That’s as far as Democrats ever take the discussion.

Are the taxes paid the same?

In 2009, the latest year I have these numbers for, the top income quintile paid 68 percent of ALL Federal taxes. Which includes payroll taxes.

In 1999, under Clinton rates, it was 65 percent.

If you look at just income taxes, which is the rates we’re talking about increasing, in 1999 the top quintile paid 89 percent of all income taxes. In 2009, that number was 94 percent.

Would that be more taxes paid now, or less?

The military. National parks. NASA. Roads. Department of Energy. Research. Infrastructure. Every welfare and social program that isn’t Social Security or Medicare. Everything else you can think of that the Federal government does.

94 percent of it all is paid by those in the top 20 percent of income.

And before you ask, their share of income is about 50 percent.

I want a hard number from Democrats on what percentage, precisely, constitutes a “fair share” of the burden of running this country.

But then, the usefulness of this class-warfare idiocy as a political weapon would vanish, wouldn’t it?

It’s idiotic.

Rich people are doing just fine thanks. WTF is unfair in asking the wealthy to pay the same rate as middle class people? As if even that is going to happen. All of your hysterical bullshit about socialist takeover of the America is about a few percentage points increase in the upper tax rate.

Pathetic.

In short, the leaders of the foxes are in charge of guarding the henhouse from the rest of the foxes.

Let that sink in a while.

Now why don’t you let that sink in for a while.

The history of the last hundred years, from Teddy Roosevelt to the present, has been of one Conservative obstruction after another, and every one has worked for the better after it was overcome. You fought progress and decency every single step of the way, and when you were forced to retreat, you had the audacity to claim credit for every little victory the people paid for, sometimes in blood.

You can’t deny it Tom. Your side’s Red-baiting and foot-dragging, and violence (yeah, you used to break strikes with bayonets and Pinkerton thugs in your “good old days”) is a long and unbroken history of greed, hate and lies.

America’s strength and wealth has been gained in spite of your side, not because of it. And we are the envy of the world because of it.

As my grandfather used to say to people like you,

“I am no Communist, but if it weren’t for people like you, we wouldn’t need any.”

Your described efficient and humane society has a lot to recommend it. But as I have pointed out in the past, there is considerable evidence the U.S. arrived at that point many years ago.

You can stop now.

It’s a bogeyman you’ve created to justify laissez faire exploitation of the people who actually do the work. Your freedom speeches don’t fool anybody, Tom. You just think people who own businesses, or work as managers for them, should run the world because they are better than people who just work for a living. And I bet you see yourself as one of that privileged few. That’s the Narcissism part.

And you conveniently characterize anyone who disagrees with you as out to steal your stash. And that’s the Paranoia. You’re a failed Babbitt, Tom. Just another Willy Loman. A classic American Archetype.

Give up on the erudite and over stretched historical metaphors. The Manifesto was written over a century and a half ago, nobody takes it seriously any more, not even the very few Marxists that still remain in the world. No one takes them seriously either, except your ilk.

Don’t enoble yourself as a valiant warrior for Freedom. Your petty problems are purely psychological, not grand global ideological struggles.

Re-define Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler, Mao, Mussolini, Saddam, Ghaddafi, Castro, Jong-Il, Assad, Mugabe, and all the rest as “owners,” and somehow we’re at a “corporate plutocracy?”

I don’t think so.

In fact, it might be interesting to come up with a list of any tyrants who started out as successful businessmen. There’s a research project for you. I can come up with some off the top of my head, but I have to go back to the merchant republics of Italy to do it.

By the way “oligarchy” is not a synonym for “plutocracy.”

Anybody else want to try a tally?

P.S. Your feeble defense of communism is noted: “tried and failed.”

From the Communist Manifesto, written by Engels and Marx, the initial demands of the movement:

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of the population over the country.

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form and combination of education with industrial production.

Absolute State power. Right at the foundation of the concept. Inherent in it, like any “utopian” movement.

The Communists tried to come up with an alternative last century and they failed. So you want us to go back to the Gilded Age and restore the old regime.

The most efficient and humane form of political economy is a democratic, constitutionally regulated and managed capitalist state. What we have had with variations in America and Western Europe for about a century That is Western man’s greatest contribution to world civilization.

What you want is a late 19th century world of Satanic mills and robber barons, where trade unionists and anarchists are run down by Cossacks in the snow.

You may fancy yourself a great entrepreneur victimized by the Bolsheviki, Tom. But you’re just another proletarian bum, and an unemployed one at that. Wise up.

The goal of Anarchy is not to replace Business with the State. It is to replace all forms of hierarchy, coercion and manipulation with personal, individual freedom.