Letters We Wish We'd Written Dept., War On The Middle Class Edition

The letter below was in response to a recent op/ed by the once great Washington Post Bezos Bugle's conservative plutocrat shill and non-economist Robert J. "Not Paul" Samuelson on why "the system" is rigged toward the middle class, not the wealthy (you need only read the first few paragraphs to get the gist of Samuelson's argument).  That's right: those greedy middle class "takers" are grabbing all the goodies from the one percent "makers!" (Let's pause here for a serious question to our reader demographic:  Do you feel the system has been rigged in your favor?  We didn't think so.)  But, as we know, reality has a liberal bias:

Robert J. Samuelson’s op-ed column had a fundamental flaw. He claimed the federal government has a bias for the poor and middle class as opposed to the rich, citing funds spent on Social Security and the fact the rich pay the majority of taxes in the United States. 

He failed to note that U.S. workers paid through their working lives for Social Security. He completely ignored that, for the past three decades-plus, incomes of the rich have risen several hundred percent while middle-income workers’ wages have been stagnant. Since the economic recovery, the top 1 percent have gained 95 percent of all new income with the remaining amount going to the next 9 percent. Nine out of 10 Americans received a great big nothing in new income. 

Public policy has been deliberately framed to favor the rich and well-connected. Mr. Samuelson might examine the recent omnibus spending bill that gave banks the power to use federally insured deposits in derivative speculation. If the deal goes well, bankers keep the bucks. If not, taxpayers foot the bill. Thanks to the same bill, retirees might lose part of the pensions they already receive and the government won’t help. 

Bias for the middle class, indeed! 

Fred Rotondaro, Washington  

The writer is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

Another letter writer named Gregory Diercks had a more detailed rebuttal to Samuelson that we're not reprinting here, but is worth your time to check out.

Basically, Samuelson is Oxycontin Rush Limbaugh with some intellectual patina.  They share the same view that the 2008 crash was the result of gummint policies allowing expanded middle class homeownership, rather than the greed and sociopathy of Wall Street and its network of shady lenders and speculators.  What a joy that the once great Washington Post Bezos Bugle is affording this reactionary valuable space on its op/ed pages.