Nobel Award economist Paul Krugman writes in a column “America Goes Dark”:
“… it’s true that state and local governments, hit hard by the recession, are cash-strapped. But they wouldn’t be quite as cash-strapped if their politicians were willing to consider at least some tax increases…
“In effect, a large part of our political class is showing its priorities: given the choice between asking the richest 2 percent or so of Americans to go back to paying the tax rates they paid during the Clinton-era boom, or allowing the nation’s foundations to crumble — literally in the case of roads, figuratively in the case of education — they’re choosing the latter…
“The antigovernment campaign has always been phrased in terms of opposition to waste and fraud — to checks sent to welfare queens driving Cadillacs, to vast armies of bureaucrats uselessly pushing paper around. But those were myths, of course; there was never remotely as much waste and fraud as the right claimed…”
WATCHDOG: Three wags of the tail! We cannot understand why the 98% of the population, who have experienced virtually no improvement in their real incomes over the past three decades, are so resistant to allowing the income taxes of the top 2% richest to revert to pre-George W. Bush levels and to allow estates of $3 million or more to be subject to inheritance tax. (We don’t tax the dead; we tax their heirs!)
