Krugman Nails Class Warfare Argument.

I thought these few points from a Paul Krugman column made the point well:

NY Times: This week President Obama said the obvious: that wealthy Americans, many of whom pay remarkably little in taxes, should bear part of the cost of reducing the long run budget deficit. And Republicans like Representative Paul Ryan responded with shrieks of “class warfare” ... between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted income of families in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. Meanwhile, over the same period, the income of the very rich, the top 100th of 1 percent of the income distribution, rose by 480 percent. So do the wealthy look to you like the victims of class warfare? 

Mr. Ryan has called the deficit an “existential threat” to America. Yet they are insisting that the wealthy — who presumably have as much of a stake as everyone else in the nation’s future — should not be called upon to play any role in warding off that existential threat.

Well, that amounts to a demand that a small number of very lucky people be exempted from the social contract that applies to everyone else. And that, in case you’re wondering, is what real class warfare looks like.