Our Class War Rages On

The election is over, but that doesn't mean the class war between the super-rich and the not-rich is at an end. Having lost at the ballot box, now the plutocracy is trying to use "stealth" to get its way, using the cover of bipartisan, "sensible responses to the budget deficit," writes Paul Krugman in the New York Times. Case in point: the call to raise the retirement and Medicare eligibility age, supposedly because life expectancy is going up. But in fact life expectancy is up the most among the rich. "Why should janitors have to retire later because lawyers are living longer?"

Limiting deductions instead of raising tax rates is also a trick, says Krugman: No amount of deduction-limiting will bring in as much money as "letting the relevant parts of the Bush-era tax cuts expire." Even Bowles-Simpson, which Krugman does not like much, started with the assumption that the high-end Bush tax cuts would expire. "It’s an uncomfortable but real truth that we are not all in this together," he writes. The rich are "trying to use the pretense of concern about the deficit to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Let’s not let them pull it off." Click for Krugman's full column. (More Paul Krugman stories.)