Dear Dirty America

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David Brooks writes about Obama’s dear dirty jobs bill:

He claimed we can afford future Medicare costs if we raise taxes on the rich. He repeated the old half-truth about millionaires not paying as much in taxes as their secretaries. (In reality, the top 10 percent of earners pay nearly 70 percent of all income taxes, according to the I.R.S. People in the richest 1 percent pay 31 percent of their income to the federal government while the average worker pays less than 14 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office.)

This wasn’t a speech to get something done. This was the sort of speech that sounded better when Ted Kennedy was delivering it. The result is that we will get neither short-term stimulus nor long-term debt reduction anytime soon, and I’m a sap for thinking it was possible.

I wonder how much of this information David Brooks got from his tea mug. The richest 1 percent of Americans could handle a slight tax increase since the richest 1 percent of Americans have had a stellar two years of profit.

In fact, one of the main reasons the richest 1 percent of Americans are that wealthy is because of the buying frenzy of the middle class Americans. They spent and spent and spent over the decades. Now, they need to be bailed out. The middle class is too big to fail, and yet, we’re letting them fail. It’s destroying our entire economy. Without the middle class’ buying power, there is very little demand, and without demand, the economy suffocates.