yes, even possibilities. But maybe, just maybe, we're at a point where more than a few Democrats can openly proclaim the virtues of progressive taxation without cowering before the fears of the "class warfare" tar brush.
"This is not class warfare, this is math, The money is going to have to come from someplace," President Obama said emphatically this week in reference to his latest package of tax increases for the wealthy and entitlement reforms paring back government benefits and functions. Though, as framed by John Dickerson at Slate:
The president gives these extended brow-furrowing speeches periodically. His supporters get all excited, then he withdraws or makes a deal with Republicans (as he did with the Bush tax cuts and the debt ceiling), and they get deflated again. It has happened so much during his first term that this sequence of events is in danger of replacing the usual cliché for cruel disappointment, that moment when Lucy pulls the football away from Charlie Brown and he winds up flat on his back.
Whether that replays yet again remains to be seen, but Dickerson at least raises the hope that this time might be different.
Meantime, Elizabeth Warren recently gave one of the most refreshingly direct responses to the class warfare canard that we've heard in a while from a mainstream political voice:
I hear all this, you know, “Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.”—No!There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.
