shakran

I think people are coming to realize just how much capitalism sucks, but they can't think of anything better to replace it with, and even if they could they've been so inundated with the "non-capitalism is automatically bad, evil, and un-American no matter what" idea since they were little kids that they'd be unwilling to speak up about it. People are starting to get frustrated because it's finally becoming apparent that capitalism means some prosper, but the cost is that the more one guy has, the less someone else has. The 80's really started the backslide - as the wealthy began to gobble up more and more of the country's money, the non-wealthy were forced to choose between lowering their standard of living, or going in debt up to their eyeballs to maintain it. The idea of taxing the wealthy more enthusiastically than the rest of us was immediately and loudly dismissed, even by the non-wealthy, because people believe just about anything they read in the media as long as that media is biased toward fantasy.

By that I refer to Rush Limbaugh and his ilk who perpetuate the fantasy that we can all get rich if only we work hard enough (we can't all do it, it's completely impossible under the capitalist system), and that since one of these days we're gonna be rich we'd better make sure that once we get there we aren't taxed too highly!

In other words, as John Dickinson said during the 2nd Continental Congress, "People would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor."

While we might see trickles in the media for awhile about how terrible the wide and ever-widening gulf between the rich and everyone else is, it's going to take awhile before we see anything substantive. Even in your article, the author claims that "I understand that the wealthy pay more than their fair share of taxes" - which is patently false. They do not. They haven't for decades. And until they do, the burden will be on the middle class (which has by and large gone into massive debt attempting to live like the rich while still having to pay the disproportional taxes of the non-rich), and the lower class (who either see a proportionally larger chunk of their paycheck taken away by the government, or suffer reduced aid programs because the rich won't pay their fair share).

It's going to be a long time, if ever, before anyone in the main stream media dares to question the fundamentals of our economy, and it will be a longer time before whoever questions it can do so without being labeled a "goddamn communist."