The rich get richer, the poor get steamrolled. (tonywoodphoto)

I vote “yes” on Robert Reich’s call for higher taxes on the rich:

…Remarkably, taxes on the top have plummeted. From the 1940s until 1980, the top tax income tax rate on the highest earners in America was at least 70 percent. In the 1950s, it was 91 percent. Now it’s 35 percent. Even if you include deductions and credits, the rich are now paying a far lower share of their incomes in taxes than at any time since World War II… If the rich were taxed at the same rates they were half a century ago, they’d be paying in over $350 billion more this year alone, which translates into trillions over the next decade. That’s enough to accomplish everything the nation needs while also reducing future deficits.

I vote “no” on Paul Ryan’s far-right budget plan and wonder how many Americans understand that Ryan and his well-healed, whitebread homeys are trying to consign progressivism to the scrapheap of history. Their plans always boil down to this: The sky is falling and the only thing gonna save us are drastic sacrifices by the working class to the wealthy.

Economists such as Reich and Paul Krugman dismiss these right-wing con artists, but the mainstream news media — i.e., editors and reporters of the news, as opposed to the pundits — make no effort to separate the verities from the voodoo.

Here’s Krugman on Ryan’s contention that large tax cuts would increase revenue by almost $600 billion over the next 10 years:

A more sober assessment from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office tells a different story. It finds that a large part of the supposed savings from spending cuts would go, not to reduce the deficit, but to pay for tax cuts. In fact, the budget office finds that over the next decade the plan would lead to bigger deficits and more debt than current law.

You might think business reporters and analysts at the NY Times, Washington Post, et al., would be on the case, writing stories that either debunk or defend Ryan’s plan, an updated version of Reagan-era voodoo economics that helped get us in the mess we’re in today. But you would be wrong.