Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich are leading the charge by Republican presidential primary candidates who claim, falsely, that President Obama has spurred class warfare. Romney claims Obama has done so by calling for a more equitable tax structure between the 99 percent of Americans and the nation’s megamillionaires and billionaires. Gingrich taints his own class-warfare subterfuge with racism by invoking the rising number of African-Americans receiving food stamps. Given their own harshly divisive comments and behaviors which actually do foment financial and racial divides, their hypocrisy and pandering is stunning.
It is Romney the megamillionaire venture capitalist, not Obama, who will not reveal his income tax statements, and who benefits so greatly from the 15 percent tax rate on dividends and investments that wrongly hyper-inflates the fortunes of this nation’s super-rich top tenth of one percent. That “carrying rate” on investments and interest, which covers most of Romney’s wealth, is nearly double the effective rate of income taxes on secretaries and factory workers.
Calling attention to the exponential gains that accrue to the ultra-wealthy from such tax inequity over time does not promote class-warfare. It’s a reasonable call for a sounder fiscal policy to correct a widening wealth gap between the super-rich and the rest of America that is now greater than any time in the last 80 years.
Gingrich’s race-baiting is far more despicable than Romney’s backward defense of tax inequity. Gingrich is going around South Carolina working the political race-card — and drawing wild applause — by hawking the lie that Obama is “the greatest food-stamp president in American history.” He further claims Obama and his fellow liberals don’t mind if (black) people don’t work because they want to “maximize dependence” on the government.
His vile, inflammatory racism is repugnant, and wildly wrong on the facts surrounding food stamps, which go to far more whites than to black families. Gingrich’s taunt is also linked with his continuing, racially divisive suggestion that America’s most impoverished black families had rather receive public assistance than work. He says that’s why he supports giving young black youths jobs as apprentice “school janitors” — a position he has cited several times — so they can develop a work ethic.