Contemporary class warfare

What does class warfare look like in the days of extreme-right rule?

For starters, it means that Congress will try to abolish the inheritance tax, at a cost to you of $760 billion over a decade. That cost consists of $600 billion that would need to be borrowed to make up the revenue shortfall, and another $160 billion in interest. The public benefit from abolishing this tax would acrue to the 2% of estates that actually pay it; the cost, of course, would be borne by all taxpayers. That's what used to be called "wealth transfer", only now, the wealth is being transferred from the bottom 98% to the top 2%.

If the estate tax had not existed, it is a safe bet that entities such as the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Libraries, MoMA, the New York Public Library, the Gates Foundation, and so on, would not exist, or only in severely straitened circumstances.

On the other hand, our bosses in Congress decided that people who work for the minimum wage don't need a raise, even though they haven't gotten one since 1997. Apparently, we can afford a $600 billion giveaway to the Walton and Hilton families, but we can't afford to pay the Lopez and Smith families more than $10,700 per annum.

As with the estate tax, there is much disinformation being thrown about in reference to the minimum wage. Some people say it kills jobs. At an individual level, of course there are examples of this. But overall, states that have raised their minimum wage have seen higher job growth than those that have not. This because, in direct contraditction of sacred reactionary trickle-down dogma, it really is true that poor people tend to spend any extra money, thereby creating new jobs.

The new class warfare doesn't have anything to do with peasants storming palaces. Rather, the aristocrats are burning down the hovels, with the willing help of the peasants.