Far Right denounces Reagan policies and stands against middle class tax cuts
Originally published at An Experimental Life. You can comment here or there.
You read that right. Now, I didn't say that they denounce Ronald Reagan himself, but they are coming out in opposition to his policies on both taxes and foreign relations.
The average top tax rate for Republican administrations as in for the absolutely richest Americans is 51 percent, as opposed to Obama's proposed 39 percent for that same tax bracket, and for all but 13 months of President Reagan's time in office, those taxes were higher than under President Obama's plan.
If the the far right thinks President Obama's tax rates are too high, then surely they think poorly of President Reagan's, and indeed, the average tax rates under Republican presidents in general.
In fact, the Far Right is organizing protests against tax rates that are lower than those under the majority of the Reagan presidency. They favor higher taxes than Obama does for the middle class and below, and lower taxes for the richest Americans and large corporations, since they believe that when people can't afford to buy goods and services, the answer is to give more money to those who produce those goods and services--the idea here being that these corporations will hire more people to produce the goods and services that they cannot sell because people can't afford to buy them.
President Obama's tax plan cuts taxes for all those making less than $250,000 a year, and returns a large portion of payroll taxes to the poorest Americans. The Far Right calls this welfare and socialism, since they do not consider any payroll tax except regular income tax to be, well, a tax. The U.S. government giving billions a year to the oil industry must be socialism too, then right? And, as I said in a previous post, our system of interstate highways meets their definition of socialism, as well. I'm waiting for the far right to stop using the interstates.
Keep in mind, too, that this 39% is a marginal tax rate--Meaning that those making over $250,000 a year pay the 39% rate only on income over $250,000. So if you make $256,000, you pay the lower tax rate for the first 250,000 and the 39 percent rate for the last 6,000.
They also stand against President Obama's negotiating with our enemies, which, again, President Reagan--the Great Communicator--believed in.
Then again--getting away from Reagan's policies, but sticking with the current views of the far right--they are against allowing workers who want to unionize having a choice between a secret ballot and a card-signing ballot, claiming that giving such a choice robs them of the option of a secret ballot.
Under president Bush, ignoring the fourth amendment, keeping a database of all telephone calls in America, and recording every overseas call, and authorizing interrogation techniques for which we hung people as war criminals after WWII was all well and good. Yet they think President Obama wants to take away our rights?
Under President Obama, who has never proposed or supported any federal law banning handguns, but supported the right of individual communities to pass laws about handguns, they claim that handguns will be banned.
Oh, yes. Apparently they believe that the Hawaiian government is lying about President Obama's status as a natural-born American citizen, and that his birth certificate, which is posted online, is fake.
Then again, they seem to consider the citizens of Hawaii expendable anyway, along with those of Washington state, and Alaska, since they think that it is wasteful spending to monitor volcanoes in order to give early notice of impending eruptions.
And this is just scratching the surface.
You may point and laugh at them now.