But they're more important, aren't they...

Mitt Romney has thus far been unwilling to release more than two years of his tax returns. It’s not that he has to release his returns, but what Romney doesn’t understand is that while no one is going to actually force him to do so, not releasing them keeps the question in the air and will ultimately be answered by the American people during the election. Romney doesn’t get it. He’s whining, as if it’s the Obama campaign that is demanding the release. The Obama campaign knows he doesn’t want to release them, so having someone else like Harry Reid continue to press the issue is brilliant, because as long as people are suspect about why Romney doesn’t want to release them, they’re not thinking about the fledgling economy.

However, Romney’s reticence to release more than two years’ returns is not what I want to take about, it’s more about Romney’s general philosophy on taxation. Romney just released a statement today (unsubstantiated by documentation) that he has paid no less than 13% taxes over the past 10 years. Okay, let’s take that statement at face value; that would mean that Harry Reid’s “source” was lying, and that Mitt Romney had in fact paid taxes. However, 13% taxes is a MUCH lower rate than the majority of Americans pay, especially working Americans.

The standard rate is about 35%. Fair or not, that is what it is. However, most wealthy people pay much less that than, typically between 15 – 25%, if not less. The current Republican position is that capital gains and inheritance should be taxed at a much lower rate than income. Flat – that’s their position. So essentially what they’re saying is that they think that people who make money from doing nothing (and already have a substantial amount of money) should be taxed at dramatically lower rates (or nothing at all) than people who actually work. If I make $10,000 a year, I would pay roughly $3,500 in taxes. However, if I made $100,000,000 from investment income, I would only pay $13,000,000 in taxes (taking home $87,000,000), or none at all under they Romney/Ryan plan.

Romney says that the reason for the lower tax rate is because those people with vast sums of money invested are “job creators”; but Warren Buffet, one of the richest men in the world, makes the argument that people make investments to make money, not based upon what tax they will be paying. The reason the so-called “job creators” are not investing in the current economy is because it’s in the tank and they will not see a return on their investment.

Ultimately, this is an issue of supporting the country that supported you (Obama’s argument). Wealthy people have made vast sums of money over the past 3+ decades because of policies that cut their tax rates dramatically and allowed them to park their money in foreign countries. Also, a lot of their money has been made in investments that did little or nothing to actually create jobs, but instead were specifically made to create wealth (hedge funds, investment firms, etc.). Therefore, while their incomes and wealth have risen dramatically (nearly 400%), the real incomes of the upper middle, middle, and lower classes have either stagnated or even fallen. Literally fallen. The average income has fallen from about $36,000 in 1970 to $32,000 in 2010.

Since the wealthy have benefitted so nicely from these rates and policies over the last three decades, and since their wildcat investments drove our economy over a cliff, it’s time they started paying back. Even making the tax rate even across income/investment levels would be more fair than what we currently have. But what we really should do is cut out tax breaks and loopholes specifically designed for the wealthy, and create a graduated wealth and income tax that forces the wealthy to put in their fair share of income to this country that has benefitted them so much. If they don’t like the tax policies, they can leave. The country could use LESS people who are making vast sums of money toying with the market, but then paying nothing into the public coffers once they get their big payoff. Our country is hurting, and it’s obvious that Mitt Romney and those of his ilk care nothing for this country or the economy, but instead are still looking out for themselves and their wealthy friends.

Newt Gingrich charged Obama with stoking the flames of “class warfare”; and you know what, he was right. But the class warfare is not being waged by the poor against the rich, it’s being waged by the rich against the poor, and has been for generations. It’s about time a leader, and especially a president, highlight this issue and try and open the eyes of the majority of the people in this country who are being swindled by a bagful of citizens.

The War of the Classes...

Class warfare is real - it is really happening, and has been really happening since...well, since our republic was founded. However, for the two centuries prior to the 1980s, the class warfare argument was being made by the poor (mainly) and the middle class against the rich.
Somehow, the wealthy in this country - or at least the wealthy by political proxy - have begun to make the class warfare argument of the rich against the poor.
Since the advent of the Occupy Wall Street movement, we've heard non-stop from conservative politicians that the occupiers, and President Obama in supporting their disillusionment with the plutocratic/oligarchic system we've devolved into in this country. It's been a repeated argument by Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, two men who certainly know something about class warfare, because they've been engaging in it for their entire careers.
The rich have been engaging in class warfare against the middle class and poor in this country for the last 30+ years. They've used every means as their disposal to chip away at the democratic system, all to increase their personal wealth. If we look at income disparity in this country, we see that incomes of the wealthiest people in this country have risen over 185% in the last 30 years, while middle and low income workers have either stagnated, or for the first time in history, gone down. Also, we've seen a steady decline in the tax rate for the wealthiest in this country, from a high during the middle of the last century of more than 65%, to a meager 32% currently. This means that through the rough economy of the 1980s and again during the 2000s (for most people, the top-tier continued to do well during those "rough" times), the rich continued to pay less and less of their taxes.
So how has the class warfare argument shifted from the rich against the poor to the poor against the rich? The rich control information. The rich control all media, and therefore are able to manipulate opinion. So as soon as the president or the middle class start having a discussion about rich people simply paying their fair share, you hear the wealthy (by political proxy) complain that the president and the middle class are engaging in tax warfare. The argument the wealthy make is that they're the "job creators", which has shown during this downturn to be complete bullshit, because they've essentially horded their money during these lean times. I'm not a class warrior, and I do agree that in good times people with money are more capable of creating companies (and by default, jobs) than those with no money, but I think this line of thinking fails to recognize two things: the first is that the wealthy are not creating companies to create jobs, they're creating them to make money (which I won't make a value judgment about here, it's just a fact), and second, just because people in the middle and lower classes don't create jobs, it doesn't make them less valuable as citizens (although politicians would have you believe this).
Bottom line: there is a still a class war being waged in this country, but it's a war of the wealthy "capitalists" - what Ayn Rand would call the moochers - against both the capitalist system, as well as the middle and lower classes. We as a society are being taken advantage of by a system of collusion between government and business that has set in place mechanisms to benefit the few to the detriment to the many.
And while the middle and lower-middle class still has a small voice, the poor have been all but forgotten, by EVERYONE. No one speaks of the poor anymore, because they have no political capital and vote in small numbers. We need to re-engage everyone in this country in a national discourse about how to best move forward in a utilitarian way.