The Century Long Effort to De-Tax the Rich

            The news link on our course blog is to a September 18, 2013 Mother Jones article by political blogger Kevin Drum, but it is actually a connect to a review by David Cay Johnston at the news website and online journal The Prospect.  This essay by Johnston discusses the new book by Pulitzer prize-winning sociologist and author Isaac William Martin. Here Martin adds his voice to the debate over class warfare in the subject work entitled Rich People’s Movements: Grassroots Campaigns to Un-tax the One Percent, Martin argues that the conservative Tea Party movement is merely a facade for people who don’t want to pay their full tax bill. Martin further claims that the group is not really a modern phenomenon but rather a simple repackaging of an old concept, otherwise known as paranoid-special-interest masquerading as public conscience. He scoffs at the mantra of the alliance which is that trickle-down economics benefits the financial health of the poor by taxing the rich less. To prove his point, Martin enlists an expansive body of data including historical, political, social and economic information. He adamantly disagrees with the ideas of Lipsit and Raab, who argued in their 1971 publication The Politics of Unreason, that such benign attempts to massage the system in one’s favor are nothing more than “cultural baggage.”  However he concurs with historian Richard Hofstader that this type of activism has its roots in the early twentieth century.  Both Martin and Hofstader believe that the formal origin of the movement is linked to the adoption of the 1913 16^th Amendment, which adjusted the system of direct taxation.  Finally, he logically concludes that the continued marketing investment by heavyweight financiers like the exorbitantly rich Koch brothers, gives it an unfair advantage over grassroots proletarian efforts with less capital available to sell their message.

http://prospect.org/article/we-shall-overwhelm