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Since Mike Huckabee pretends to be a religious man and a Christian, maybe someone could remind him of this quote from Matthew 19:24 before he does another show on Fox carrying water for rich people as he did here.

I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.

Last I heard it was also supposed to be unchristian to lie a lot as well, but that didn't stop Huckabee from telling his audience this on Saturday evening:

HUCKABEE: President Obama appears to be willing to play chicken with Congress, because he is determined to raise taxes on the people that he's decided are just too stinking rich! Well the trouble is, even The Washington Post, hardly a conservative tool, and FED Chairman Ben Bernanke, who was reappointed by Obama are warning of the consequences of what's being accurately termed “Taxmageddon.”

The combination of the expiration of the so-called Bush tax cuts and the effect that's associated with Obamacare. It's all going to arrive on Dec. 31st, 2012. And if Congress doesn't act Taxmageddon may not adequately describe what's going to be nothing short of an economic apocalypse. The tax increases, almost $500 billion per year, in new taxes. Now that is by far the largest and most encompassing tax hike in our nation's history.

And while the President pretends to be protecting the middle class, the fact is the majority of the tax increases won't hit Obama's despised wealthy class, but will in fact hit 60 percent of Americans who actually got the biggest tax cuts, from the Bush tax plan.

For example, on average, baby boomers are going to see their taxes go up over $4200 per year. Low income families are going to have a gut punch increase of over $1200 per year. Millennials, they're going to get popped with a thousand dollar hit on average.

Now considering that the President's failed financial policies have left us drowning in national debt, with a staggering 8.2 percent unemployment rate and businesses living off life support, not addressing these concerns, well, it's about as compassionate as throwing an anchor instead of a life preserver to a man caught in a rip tide.

The Obama tax increases set to hit January 1st are far more ominous than we even would have feared from the impact of the Y-2K moment of January 1st back in 2000.

Because we really aren't sure and weren't sure then what might happen at midnight that night. And we did all we knew to do to prepare for it.

Never mind that Democrats just voted to extend the tax cuts for everyone's income under $250,000 a year and forget all about that guy named Bush who is actually responsible for running up the deficit we have right now. Those things never happened in Fox world.

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Stephen Colbert took on everything from President Obama's promise to let the Bush tax cuts expire, to a poll by The Hill showing that 75 percent of Americans think wealthy should pay 30 percent or less in taxes, to a bill in Florida that would slash minimum wage for tipped workers in his Word segment this Wednesday night.

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Joe Scarborough seems to have a little problem understanding why people would be upset with Mitt Romney's great wealth and how much he pays in taxes, or at least he pretended to on this Monday's Morning Joe. Here's Scarborough doing his best to carry a little water for Mittens and downplay whether those things should be an issue in the general election.

SCARBOROUGH: John Heilemann, Americans didn’t care that Jack Kennedy was rich. They didn’t care that Roosevelt was rich. They didn’t even care that John Kerry was rich in ’04. People aren’t talking about that. But Mitt Romney has given the Obama team so many buzzwords, Swiss bank account, Cayman Islands, "I like firing people," 14 percent, "let the market bottom out"...

BRZEZINSKI: "I know what it's like to be unemployed."

SCARBOROUGH: ...pink slips, I know what it's like.. You could go on and on. He has set himself up for a November killing.

BRZEZINSKI: He's the 1 percent.

After John Heilemann noted that Romney's "painted himself as a combination of Gordon Gekko and Richie Rich" and that his refusal to release his tax returns is going to come back to haunt him, Scarborough came back with this.

SCARBOROUGH: I’m not trying to be argumentative, but I think it’s a fair question to ask. [...] Why would they care that Mitt Romney paid a 14.3 percent tax on his income when John Kerry paid a 13.1 percent tax on his income and he had more money than Mitt Romney?

Simple answer Joe. Because they weren't advocating for austerity and policies that would make the fact that we've got record income disparity in the United States worse while also pushing policies that would make their own taxes lower, like Mitt Romney is now.

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I know Dave already posted some of this portion from the NBC-Facebook Republican primary debate this Sunday, but I thought this portion of the exchange deserved to be highlighted.

Mitt Romney: Don’t Run For Office If You Need The Salary:

Mitt Romney recounted some advice from his father, former presidential candidate George Romney, in Sunday’s NBC/Facebook debate about running for office: make sure you’re set for cash already. [...]

Spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom told TPM that Romney’s fatherly advice was limited to the candidate himself.

“This was personal advice from a father to son,” he said. “People may make their own choices.”

Spokesmen for Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich appeared to take him at his word, declining to comment on Romney’s quote. But others were less generous: Rick Perry advisor Nelson Warfield slammed the anecdote as a symptom of Romney’s wealthy upbringing.

“Mitt Romney had another $10,000 bet moment,” he told TPM. “Suggesting only the wealthy can ran for office is something out of a Green Acres scenario of running for president.”

Rodell Mollineau, president of Democratic Super PAC American Bridge, also condemned the comments.

“I’d say that Romney has forgotten what it’s be part of the working class or middle class, but he never was,” Mollineau said, adding his quote showed he “has no idea what average Americans are going through on a daily basis.”

Romney comes across as so stiff and out of touch in these debates, it's just astounding that he's the best that the GOP has to offer this year. Bragging about how you forced someone to mortgage their home to run for office doesn't exactly make him some endearing figure to the working class out there, even if it was Ted Kennedy he was talking about. He still basically said that anyone who is a member of the working class shouldn't be running for public office, regardless of his campaign's claim that the advice supposedly only applied to him.

Full transcript below the fold.

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Just before President Obama gave his speech this Tuesday in Osawatomie, Kansas, Fox's Megyn Kelly brought on The National Review's Sarah Palin fan-boy, Rich Lowry to opine over whether there was some risk involved for the president by invoking Teddy Roosevelt with this latest push to get Republicans to agree to an extension of the payroll tax holiday.

Naturally Kelly was very concerned over whether this would place some undue burden on the, as she called them, "so-called rich" and they dismissed the fact that we have record income disparity now which is similar to Roosevelt's time because no one paid personal income tax in those days. Naturally they also used the opportunity to repeat the Republican talking points that Americans are over-taxed, over-regulated and that our entitlement programs are out of control to claim that Roosevelt would be horrified by the tax burden placed on them now. Lowry repeated the lie that the administration is trying to take us back to the days when upper earners were paying as high as fifty percent or more in taxes, when no one is talking about going back to those rates now.

And of course they couldn't finish trashing President Obama for daring to want to talk about some fairness in our economy without pulling out the other Fox boogeyman... Socialism. The horror.

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It seems millionaire Nick Hanauer's recent op-ed on why we need to be taxing the rich in America has, as Steve Benen explained, “caused a stir, and with good reason.”

Political Animal – Raise Nick Hanauer's Taxes:

If Hanauer’s name doesn’t sound familiar, he’s a very successful venture capitalist, playing a role in the creation of companies like Amazon.com. This week, he took on a standard Republican talking point: the notion that job creation suffers if taxes go up on the rich. Hanauer explained very well why the GOP’s approach is backwards.

I can start a business based on a great idea, and initially hire dozens or hundreds of people. But if no one can afford to buy what I have to sell, my business will soon fail and all those jobs will evaporate.

That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is the feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion a virtuous cycle that allows companies to survive and thrive and business owners to hire. An ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than I ever have been or ever will be.

It appears that Hanauer, unlike GOP policymakers, understands supply and demand, and that three decades of concentrating wealth at the top doesn’t create an economic base that ensures broad prosperity. Republicans can keep lavishing more and more money on the rich, but they’ll only spend so much. [...]

Hanauer’s advice? Raise his taxes, make public investments, and get some money in the pockets of middle-class consumers.

Digby’s take on this rings true: “This is a person who really doesn’t want to kill the golden goose of capitalism but would like to save it. It doesn’t speak well for the future of capitalism that there are so few entrepreneurs like him.”

Damn straight.

Be sure to go read the entire editorial here -- Raise Taxes on Rich to Reward True Job Creators: Nick Hanauer.

Hanauer was a guest on Neil Cavuto's show on Fox Business this Wednesday and he did a great job knocking down every one of Cavuto's arguments and straw men as Cavuto desperately tried to rebut Hanauer's assertions on why the rich aren't paying enough in taxes.

Here's the shortened version of their conversation with a tiny bit of paraphrasing and which does not reflect Cavuto constantly interrupting and talking over Hanauer.

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During a discussion on PBS's The McLaughlin Group where the panel of Tim Carney and Pat Buchanan on the right and weekly lonely representative of the left Eleanor Clift and someone that didn't belong there with her on the left side of the aisle as usual, billionaire Mort Zuckerman, I caught something unusual that we don't hear every day when Zuckerman is allowed on the air, and that's someone asking him just what he's worth.

John McLaughlin did just that during a discussion on President Obama campaigning on the co-called "Buffet rule" and asking millionaires and billionaires to start paying their fair share in taxes. Zuckerman really did not want to discuss just how much money he makes every year, but said he was more than happy to discuss Warren Buffett's finances if McLaughlin wanted to do so.

Zuckerman also resorted to the usual nonsense that we'd have actually gotten some meaningful "reform" on taxes done if President Obama had just gone to the Republicans in private and asked them kindly if they'd be willing to quit obstructing and trashing him in public on a weekly basis and kissed their rings to get some "bipartisan" cooperation on changing our tax code.

As Clift rightfully pointed out here, it's been obvious for a long time that they're not willing to work with him on anything, even when it's him embracing what were formerly their policies, so he's basically been left with no choice but to take his case to the voters for the next election.

Excuse me please if I share Clift's sentiments here that heaven forbid we hurt these poor rich people's feelings by asking them to think they should contribute to our society in America by some similar or greater percentages than the middle class and the poor are taxed right now.

Of course, Zuckerman claimed that he supports the rich, such as himself paying their fair share as well, but I'd be curious if anyone pushed him on the specifics of that support on just what those specifics would be just how well that claim actually holds up. Of course none of those specifics were asked for by McLaughlin here.

Zuckerman was a lot more interested in bashing the president for supposedly not trying to work with Republicans, when he has, and pretending like the Republicans in the Congress are ever going to work with him no matter what he does, and having a hissy fit about that supposed lack of cooperation during this segment.

How pathetic is it that we've got in the United States a network, PBS, that is trashed as being liberal by Republicans, when it's not and someone like a billionaire Mort Zuckerman allowed to supposedly represent the "left side of the aisle" of the political spectrum, instead of this show ever putting anyone that you could rightfully call a progressive on the air in one slot, much less two of them?

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Here's an example of why no Democrat or President Obama should ever look to the likes of someone like Michael Gerson for advice on what makes for good campaign messaging. While discussing President Obama now campaigning on raising taxes on the rich, here was some of Gerson's input after Chris Matthews asked him whether he thought it would hurt or help the president in the upcoming election, given that he's “now seen as the guy taking sides against the rich, he says aren't paying taxes.”

GERSON: I'll tell you what. I think the problem is not that he's being to harsh on the rich. I think the problem is he's being irrelevant to the only debate in American politics, which is growth and job creation. He had an anemic plan he brought forward that was largely recycled stuff and then even swamped that plan with now class warfare rhetoric.

People are concerned with Europe in economic decline, with the possibility of a second dip of an American recession. How do we get growth back in this economy? The president's not even speaking to this issue.

After some of the panel acknowledging that anything President Obama has proposed to try to get our economy back on track has been knocked down by Republicans and Chris Matthews talking about how some fairness in our tax system has finally gotten the progressive base animated and supportive of what they're hearing from the president, Matthews went to his “Matthews Meter” for the week, the question being whether “tax the rich” will get Obama votes in 2012. Three of them agreed that it was a smart move that were on the panel this week. Naturally, Gerson disagreed and then pulled out the angry black man card, or if not that, at least the heaven forbid anyone should be angry about the real class warfare we've seen waged on the poor and middle class card.

GERSON: But I think Obama's basic problem here, political problem, is changing his narrative completely. He ran the last time as the candidate of hope, inclusion, progress. Now he's running as the candidate of anger and redistribution. That's not a particularly good Democratic message.

As Andrew Sullivan rightfully pointed out, a large part of the reason the president has finally resorted to just calling out Republicans instead of continuing to try to work with them was because Republicans have obstructed everything President Obama has tried to do and he can't keep running on the meme of bipartisanship because he “looks like Lucy with the football.”

Can I just say amen to Andrew Sullivan here with that statement and for pointing out to Gerson how ridiculous it is to say that President Obama should continue to pretend that Republicans are ever going to work with him on anything. Most of us on the left have been tired of the President continuing to pretend like the Republicans were not the obstructionists they obviously showed themselves to be quite a long time ago, but Gerson apparently thinks it's still worth beating that dead horse here.

Note to Michael Gerson. It's exactly a good Democratic message that we've got horrible income disparity in the United States and asking the rich to pay their fair share and a call for some “shared sacrifice” is a message any Democratic candidate should be running on rather than asking for more austerity measures and tax breaks for the rich, which is apparently the Republican's only plan to supposedly create jobs.

The Republicans' economic policies are nothing but a race to the bottom for what's left of our dwindling middle class and American workers and Gerson's message here pretty well resonates with one group of people, and that's the far right of the Republican Party. And they're not going to do anything to help President Obama get reelected no matter what he says on the campaign trail.

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As our friend Jed Lewinson pointed out over at the Daily Kos, GOP candidate and so-called "moderate" Jon Huntsman called for some "shared sacrifice" from the rich on the PBS Newshour this Thursday, but of course that "sacrifice" should not come in the form of a tax increase. I agree completely with this assessment of that statement by Huntsman during the interview:

Excuse me, but isn't punting on that question pretty much the definition of hesitating? And how can you be taken seriously if you simultaneously rule out tax increases?

Sure, Huntsman talks a good game, and he's great at delivering "adult in the room" soundbites, but when comes down to it, on the most important issues, he's every bit as big a baby as every other Republican in the field.

What Lewinson left out was some of the claptrap we heard leading up to that. This guy is supposed to be what's considered a "moderate" candidate in the GOP presidential primary field, but what was he touting here? The same old tired talking points we've heard out of the rest of them. Flatten our tax structure and raise taxes on lower income earners, meaning the poor and the middle class. Qualified with weasel words like we could take a "progressive approach" to raising income taxes on those who don't make enough money to be paying them now.

During this interview he also promoted means testing Social Security which would turn it into a welfare program, which of course is just one step in getting rid of it altogether. He also promoted lowering taxes on corporations to make us "more competitive" and to "attract investment" which just equals another race to the bottom on wages and rewarding our under taxed corporations who still would have no incentive to put Americans back to work if we don't do something to fix our trade laws and our tax structure which rewards companies for offshore tax havens and for hiring slave labor overseas.

I don't know how much worse things are going to have to get before we move both parties back over to the left instead of what passes for the "center" these days and either party starts enacting policies where they do the right thing and help the unemployment problem we've got here before we end up as some third world country with nothing but rich and poor. Sadly the only group of politicians I've seen that from who look like they genuinely have the interests of the American worker at heart is the Progressive Caucus in the House.

All I heard from this supposedly "moderate" Republican candidate was more of the same promoting the policies that got us to where we are now with our economy being in horrible shape, more tax cuts for those that don't need them, and more dismantling of our social safety nets.

Transcript via PBS below the fold:

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I really wish that President Obama was enlisting the likes of Robert Reich instead of those in the Wall Street revolving door on what needs to be done with our tax policies in the United States.

Why We Should Raise Taxes on the Super-Rich and Lower Them on the Middle Class:

My proposal to raise the marginal tax to 70 percent on incomes over $15 million, to 60 percent on incomes between $5 million and $15 million, and to 50 percent on incomes between $500,000 and $5 million, has generated considerable debate. Some progressives think it’s pie-in-the-sky. Here, for example, is Andrew Leonard, a staff writer for Salon:

A 70 percent tax bracket for the richest Americans is pure fantasy – even suggesting it represents such a fundamental disconnect with the world as it exists today that it is hard to see why it should be taken seriously. I would be deeply worried about the sanity of a Democratic president who proposed such a thing.

Fantasy? I don’t know Mr. Leonard’s age but perhaps he could be forgiven for not recalling that between the late 1940s and 1980 America’s highest marginal rate averaged above 70 percent. Under Republican President Dwight Eisenhower it was 91 percent. Not until the 1980s did Ronald Reagan slash it to 28 percent. (Many considered Reagan’s own proposal a “fantasy” before it was enacted.)

Incidentally, during these years the nation’s pre-tax income was far less concentrated at the top than it is now. In the mid-1970s, for example, the top 1 percent got around 9 percent of total income. By 2007, they got 23.5 percent. So if anything, the argument for a higher marginal tax should be even more realistic now than it was during the days when it was taken for granted.

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