Responding to a poll showing robust majorities support raising taxes on the rich in the US, Germany, the UK, France, italy, and Spain, Andrew Leonard writes:
For a citizen of the United States such as myself, who has watched Republican presidential candidates campaign, mostly successfully, on the holy writ of tax cuts for the rich since 1980, these poll results take on a dreamlike quality. What alternate reality is this, where the rhetoric of a quarter century is suddenly turned on its head? As recently as just a few years ago, if you tried to suggest that government should consider raising taxes on the wealthy, the notion was immediately dismissed as a throwback to the "failed redistributive policies" of the past. But now it's all the rage.
I don't have the numbers from the 80s in front of me (does anyone know of some good sites that allow you to compare historical poll data?), but in 1992, 77% of Americans thought the rich were paying "too little" in taxes, and I'd bet that number didn't dip below 50% in the preceding years.
It was never the populace dismissing taxes on the rich as "the failed redistributive policies" of the past -- it was the elite. In other words, the rich. And they happen to have a lot of power in our system -- and that power (and money) has gone, in no small part, to convincing Americans that their tax burden is too high, and that cross-the-board tax cuts are the only answer. But it's important to note that there's never been any campaigning on "tax cuts for the rich." There was just a lot of campaigning on tax cuts, and anti-tax sentiment, followed by policies that quietly amounted to tax cuts for the rich. And all of this was enabled by the media, which derided tax increases as failed redistributive policies, and happily pocketed tax cuts for themselves...
