The “conservatives” have gone so far underground as to engage in full-on mythmaking as a way of life. Their entire political movement is wrapped around a denial of reality that not even “Five Year Plan” can eclipse. FDR started the Great Depression, for example.

It’s not a long hop from there to “the Joos done did it”.

They may be nuts, but they are powerful nuts, and their wingnut welfare benefactors show no signs of abandoning them. Should one of their paranoid fantasies strike a serious nerve with, say, 33% of the populace, and frighten another third into silence, well, history shows that things can get very ugly indeed.

It is important to recognize their fantasies (e.g. FDR created the Depression) and counter them with facts, with counter-narratives, and even with outright mockery, before they gain credibility.

If it was WWII, not FDR, that lifted the country out of the Depression, then take that as an admission that government spending and public works are a good thing in times of turmoil. But also, since the Depression began before FDR took office, you are dumber than a fifth grader.

You have read what is above, do as you wish, please don’t be ignorant of what you do.

Obama’s plan was well reasoned and fair and not a burden on anyone. It was already a compromise in a manner of speaking. We could just demand they go back the tax rates of the 1950’s, when 50% of the federal budget came from corporate taxes, where we’re well below 17% now.

I think it is not only a wise move but practically a patriotic duty precisely to soak the rich so that they can not engage in more of these insane financial schemes.

Since historical revision, rampant polemics, and class demagoguery seem the order of the moment, it might be useful to review the basis of tax policy from the New Deal until Reagan’s “simplification” of ca. 30 progressive tax rates to two, one highly regressive, one a tax cut from progressive policy rates.

IIRC, the progressive taxation policy was founded upon the notation of utility and the diminishing utility of money as income grew. A person living at $100 a week has 100% utility of their money whereas a person receiving $1000 a week the utility of each dollar is diminished to some fraction, e.g. a $10 haircut would not present any significant consideration for the expenditure. Therefore, the greater rates do not present significant disutility to the higher income. Contrary to the rantings of the “soak the rich” demagogues, great care must be exercised that the line between no significant disutility and disutility be crossed to the detriment of public welfare.

Significant economic ignorance allows the continuation of misapprehension of the need and role of wealth in an economy. The likeliness of this becoming a class war demagogic standard is threatening to the economic education that is necessary for the public to undergo. Wealth is nothing more than an accumulated unconsumed income, from labour, from rents, from investments, from invention. Wealth, both personal and public are the resources necessary to best meet “… and the pursuit of happiness” enshrined. Never before in history has wealth been considered other than benign until the last century. What the demagogues are after, but hide by their demagoguery, is the economic education necessary to perceive that the ownership and/or control of economic means of production, e.g. land and minerals, labour, industrial processes, transportation, etc. by monopolistic or oligopolistic factors, to which great wealth has accumulated by the fact of ownership and control, the requirement to uncouple their ownership and control would be the prescribed remedy, with the ownership and control held in public hands. It should be noted historically, that no other sovereign government ever allowed any one or small group of individuals to obtain, own and control the vast powers that were exercised by the economic barons of the late 19th century United States.

Should the public become the owner of the sources of economic production is a question that need be addressed. If so, the requirement becomes the necessity to economically manage these economic resources. Attacking wealth will be counterproductive for any who follow that path.