Paul GrahamVerified account

Disgusted by the Republicans' adventures in culture war, the Democrats now propose to give us... class war. Hard to say which the historical precedents are worse for. The 20th century was basically a hard-fought tie in that respect.

In a country where the top 1% have had massively escalating share of the ownership of the country and the bottom fifth don’t even have healthcare, how are *democrats* engaging in class war by saying that it’s obscene for people to be billionaires while others starve?!

I have to tell you, extraordinarily rich people declaring that being taxed at 70% for income *over $10 million a year* (not including capital gains etc) constitutes a ‘class war’ against them - this is a very, very, very bad look while a million people just missed two pay checks.

Of course higher tax rates per se are not class war, any more than deportations per se are culture war. But e.g. naming specific people you want to deport, in order to excite your supporters, is culture war. And naming people you want to tax, for the same reason, is class war.

You want to talk about false equivalences and logical fallacies - pointing out that the richest people in the world earn vast tracts of money and should pay more tax is not the same as attacking people’s basic citizenship rights.

Perhaps you’re arguing that someone saying that George Soros should be deported because he’s a Jewish mastermind attempting to deform democracy is the same as saying Jeff Bezos should pay more tax? One of those is a racist anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. One isn’t.