Class Warfare

President Barack Obama's news conference Wednesday - his first in 15 weeks - made clear his strategy for reelection is the same old clarion call for class warfare, pitting the evil rich against the saintly poor. "I think it's only fair," said the president, "to ask an oil company or a corporate jet owner that's doing so well to give up that tax break. …I don't think that's so radical. " In fact, he mentioned "corporate jet owners" half a dozen times during his appearance.

While it is true that the U.S. government and the states compete in a global market and must keep the costs of their goods and services as low as possible in order to compete profitably, the question is what our federal and state tax rates should be as a percentage of GDP, compared with the other developed countries, in order to assure such profit. This question is important because we need to raise revenue to reduce the federal and state deficits while not stifling the economy by excessive taxes in the present and precluding economic growth in the future.

The 2009 census shows that one in seven Americans now live below the government's laughable poverty line for a family of four: $21,954. (How many more families of four live between $21,955 and, say, $31,954 a year? Are they not impoverished?) More than 20 percent of all children are poor. We have not seen these levels since the 1960s. Recession and the loss of millions of American jobs in the last three years have been cited as the reasons for the recent rise in poverty. But there's a lot more to it than that.

Finally, a sign that Congressional Republicans may have some flexibility after all. House Minority Leader John A. Boehner's recent disclosure that he'd be willing to vote for President Barack Obama's proposed tax break for families earning $250,000 or less demonstrates that a compromise over Bush-era tax policy is possible. It appears Mr. Boehner has recognized that outrage and extremism only gets you so far. The GOP's all-or-nothing approach to tax cuts — reminiscent of the party's oppose-at-all-costs philosophy toward the president's agenda generally — wasn't going to play well with working class Americans.

Over all the years since the Reagan administration, whenever I mentioned the ever-widening gap between rich and poor, and between the rich and the middle, certain people in the room threw the class warfare flag, marched off a 15-yard penalty and accused me of making stuff up. And it was always Republicans, conservative independents, or self-described libertarians who complained -- pretty much the same people who now stand on the wrong side of...

Will aid to Gaza mean more bombs? I am totally baffled by the Obama administration's pledge of $900 million to aid Hamas and the Palestinians after Israel's justified retaliation for the months and months of senseless attacks on southern Israel from Gaza ("U.S. aid tilts toward W. Bank," March 2). When the United Nations was providing aid to Gaza during and following Israel's strikes, it was widely reported that Hamas officials were intercepting aid meant for civilian victims and not permitting them to receive the assistance they so desperately needed.

For a moment the other night, as I was checking e-mail from readers reacting to Sunday's column about John McCain's "class warfare" whine, I lost my perspective. It was a temporary condition, brought on by an armchair economist named Mark who said my characterization of people who make more than $250,000 a year as "wealthy" was inaccurate. "Can we stop with the notion that a family of four that lives in a major metropolitan area and makes $250,000 a year is wealthy?" wrote Mark, no last name given.

Maintaining a tradition that has been around since at least the Reagan Revolution, John McCain the other night ridiculed the idea of "spreading the wealth" and accused Barack Obama of playing "class warfare." This is the tired Republican knee-jerk that occurs whenever someone in the room - Democrat or independent, academic researcher or nonpartisan think-tank thinker - raises the unsettling issue of income disparity in the United States. Republicans throw the "class warfare" flag whenever somebody gets too close to the story of America in the nearly 30 years since Ronald Reagan brought us trickle-down economics.