September 19, 2011 10:02 PM UTC

"Class Warfare"--Don't Everybody Use It At Once

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• by: Colorado Pols

Ways to know that everybody got the same briefing Friday afternoon–New York Times:

Representative Paul D. Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee and a leading proponent of cutting spending on benefit programs like Medicare, said the proposal would weigh heavily on a stagnating economy.

On “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Ryan said it would add “further instability to our system, more uncertainty, and it punishes job creation.”

“Class warfare,” [Pols emphasis] he said, “may make for really good politics, but it makes for rotten economics.”

Washington Post:

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee:

“The President doesn’t get it. Last week, he gave America another stimulus that his own party won’t support. Now, he’s rolling out massive tax hikes that his own party has already rejected. Crass class warfare, [Pols emphasis] a refusal to reform our broken entitlements, and tax hikes on job creators isn’t a solution to Washington’s spending problem and won’t help our ailing economy or the 14 million Americans who are out of work. Tax increases thinly veiled as tax reform isn’t reform.”

CNN:

“When you pick one area of the economy and you say, ‘We’re going to tax those people because most people are not those people,’ that’s class warfare,” [Pols emphasis] Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

More Washington Post:

“I don’t think I would describe class warfare [Pols emphasis] as leadership,” Boehner told Fox Business Network, according to advance excerpts of an interview scheduled to air at 5 p.m. Eastern. “The government has a spending problem, and I don’t believe it makes any sense to tax the people we expect to invest in our economy.”

As we’ve noted, the public is solidly in favor–71% in favor in the latest NYT/CBS poll–of tax increases to offset spending cuts where possible in any long-term deficit reduction deal. The public also favors provisions in President Barack Obama’s “American Jobs Act” that would pay for the bill in part by eliminating certain exemptions taken by wealthy taxpayers. Republicans, recognizing in dismal poll numbers that something other than blanket rejection was needed, actually paid lip service to Obama’s jobs bill for a few days; presumably to buy time while a suitable countermessage was developed. And here it is. “Class warfare.”

We seriously doubt this is the magic needed to improve Congress’ 12% approval rating, folks. With the gap between rich and poor in America at levels not seen since before the Great Depression, there just aren’t very many left to scare with tired 1950s sloganeering. Certainly not when what you call “class warfare” is the preference of over 70% of the electorate.

At the very least, they should be smarter with the rollout. When everybody dogpiles with the exact same talking point, the whole thing comes off either desperate or scripted. Or both.