I'm not going to start cheering, as Obama should have addressed this in 2010 at the latest, and there should be more brackets and a host of other tweaks. But it is something.
Anyway, thinking about this sort of thing makes me realize that there's a danger, especially for progressives, of confusing the proposition that Obama's billionaire haters are stark raving mad — which is true — with the proposition that Obama has done nothing that hurts the plutocrats' interests, which is false. Actually, Obama has been tougher on the one percent than most progressives give him credit for. Start with taxes. The Bush tax cuts haven't gone completely away, but at the very high end they have been pretty much reversed; plus there are additional high-end taxes associated with Obamacare. The result is that taxes on wealthy Americans have basically been rolled back to pre-Reagan levels:
The level of shrieking is nevertheless far out of proportion to the actual pain. Like a toddler getting a haircut or a nail trimming.
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