GOP Speaks Up For Poor Millionares

For once leading congressional Republicans have it right. Taking to the unquestioning Sunday morning talk shows, they decried the proposed minimum tax rate for millionaires rolled out today by President Obama as "class warfare" and an insidious way to portray the GOP as being indifferent to the many hardships being faced by ordinary Americans. Which, of course, is exactly what they are.

The outpouring of bombast was not unexpected, but for the Republicans to portray themselves so accurately is, perhaps, a chess move gone awry in the party's ongoing effort to avoid joining their Democratic colleagues and the president in actually helping govern the U.S. out of unrelentingly dire economic times.

The award winner among the talking heads for sheer hubris was Representative Paul Ryan, the author of a dead-on-arrival deficit reduction plan that would have rewarded those poor, defenseless millionaires while impacting on the middle class, elderly, poor and infirm in a way that recalls Sherman's march through Georgia. Oh, and would remove virtually all regulatory controls on Wall Street.

Ryan, shriller than usual, told his friendly host at Fox News Sunday that the millionaire tax rate "adds further instability to our system, more uncertainty and it punishes job creation," which if nothing else certainly gives meaning to the term pretzel logic since the notion that the moolah the wealthy generate "trickles down" to we mere mortals has been widely discredited.

Astounding. Absolutely astounding.

Obama beat the income inequity drum loudly during his 2008 campaign but has allowed himself to be shouted down by the disloyal opposition and some Democrats as well when he has broached the idea of increasing taxes on the rich.

But this time it's going to be different.