A crushed and squeezed middle class... Oh really?

One of the things that has always irritated me about politics is how certain parties use class warfare tactics to sway voters. They tell us how "evil" the wealthy are, and how they're getting richer and richer on the backs of the poor and middle class.

The wealthy are portrayed evil opportunists who given a chance will lie, cheat, and hurt to get more money. While certainally some of the wealthy are like this (as there are bad apples in every sort of people), the whole idea of the wealthy of some sort of evil group is silly and to be honest, completely disingenueus. Of course, we COULD decide to believe that the wealthy are awful evil poor-kickers... but then that would have to include John Kerry and John Edwards who are both worth millions. Oh wait, they're Democrats. They don't count.

The truth is, the wealthy are some of the greatest philanthropists in America. The Wealthy do more investing in the businesses of America than anyone else. They have the money to invest int he economy and make it grow. All in all, the wealthy are a vital part of America's economic strength.

Now we have John Kerry talking about that report from the IRS that says that incomes shrank over 5% in the past 2 years. He belabors the idea that Bush is at fault and the poor middle class is getting squeezed by it.

The truth is, it's not the middle class that saw their incomes shrink at all. In fact, the less money you made, the less likely it was for your income to shrink. The more money you made, the harder you were hit. In fact, if you made an income of less than 100,000 dollars a year, your income, on average, went up. Of course, John Kerry is glossing over that fact. It's an election year of course.

BVut this disingenuousness is the sort of thing that Kerry and others like him have used to scare people into voting for them for years. A thinking person who looks deeper can see that the story is a lot more complex than Wealthy= bad.

Donald Luskin has a great article on the National Review about the IRS report. It even has graphs.

http://www.nationalreview.com/nrof_luskin/luskin200408191200.asp