As expected, after much posturing about how much it pained them, Obama and the Democratic leadership joined with the Republicans and voted to give the oligarchy everything they demanded, while throwing some crumbs to the rest of us and deliberately inserting a Social Security bomb that will explode later. They even snuck in an extra goodie for the rich at the last minute in the form of more generous itemized deductions for high-income households that cost $20.7 billion. Yes, what rich people, who have smart accountants to find all manner of itemized deductions (legal and illegal) to reduce their taxes, really need are more deductions.

Did you notice how quickly action was taken to pass this legislation? How the so-called gridlocked Congress can act so rapidly when the oligarchy’s interests are involved? It is just like the lightning speed with which Congress passed the Wall Street bailout in 2008. But when it comes to matters that affect the powerless, like the Zadroga bill aimed at providing medical relief to those first responders after 9/11 who now have serious health issues, nothing gets done. Jon Stewart has been outraged by this and his entire show on Thursday dealt with this single issue.

The absurdity of the tax cuts given to the rich becomes even more obvious when we look at this graph from the Congressional Budget Office at how after-tax average incomes have changed since 1979 for the various income categories. Note the steep rise in the last decade for the top 1% after the Bush tax cuts (that were just extended) were put into place.

The top 1.0% of incomes have increased four fold in that period, while the bottom 60% has been pretty much stagnant.

My prediction is that there will be a new ‘bipartisan’ effort to benefit the oligarchy even more. This one will be called tax ‘reform’. (You should always be on your guard when the two parties speak of ‘bipartisanship’ and the ‘reform’ of any institution that serves the general public.) This will be promoted by saying that the present tax code is too complicated and needs to be ‘simplified’. The servants of the oligarchy (aka the Democratic and Republican leadership) will agree that the changes must be ‘revenue neutral’, because it is now an article of faith that increasing taxes is the greatest evil in the world. But if there is to be no net gain or loss in net revenue, then any changes must mean that some will pay more tax and others will pay less. Guess who is going to win. And why? Because those who look after the interests of ordinary people will be excluded from the backrooms where the deal is hashed out.

David Stockman, budget director under Ronald Reagan and a consummate insider, points out how ordinary people get the short end:

It’s hard to achieve because the general taxpayer is busy every day taking care of his own needs, his family, his job. And he doesn’t have time to lobby for a broad tax base and reasonable rates. On the other hand, every special interest group has an economic interest in raising money through some kind of political action committee or education fund and then lobby for targeted, narrowly focused, sometimes even obscure language that they get either into the tax code on Capitol Hill or into the regulation.
…
So there’s a kind of an asymmetry of democracy, which there is no clean answer to. So until we really change the role of money in politics, I don’t know that we’ll ever address the question you raised.

During such debates, there will be a lot of talk about ‘fighting for the middle class’ and it is important to keep in mind the actual facts about family income, because politicians use the label ‘middle class’ vaguely to hide the fact that they only care about the rich. According to the US Census Bureau’s latest figures, the household income distribution by quintiles in 2009 was:

20% of households earn less than $20,450
20% of households earn between $20,450 and $38,530
20% of households earn between $38,530 and $61,800
20% of households earn between $61,800 and $100,000
20% of households earn over $100,000

The median household income (i.e., the 50% dividing line) is $50,221.

Only 5% of households earn over $180,000.

If we label the five quintiles as poor, lower middle class, middle class, upper middle class, and rich, then a narrow definition of the middle class would be the middle 20% earning between $38,530 and $61,800 and the broadest definition of middle class would be the middle 60%, those households earning between $20,450 and $100,000. Obama’s talk about ‘middle class tax cuts’ included households earning up to $250,000 which is ridiculous since that is five times the median income. People earning more than that constitute only 2% of all households. In a country with such enormous income disparities, how can anyone speak of 98% of the population as the middle class?

But such dishonest language comes easily to those politicians whose real agenda is different from their stated one. As George Orwell said in his classic 1949 must-read essay Politics and the English Language: “Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different…. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.”