Union Perspectives

Fifty-five years ago President Johnson declared his war on poverty. At this time there are 47 million Americans living beneath the poverty level. Does that number sound familiar, think Mitt Romney and his infamous talk with some of the 1 percent during his failed campaign for president. Billionaire Warren Buffet said there is a class warfare all right, but it’s my class that is winning. He is calling for higher taxes on the rich and the money to be spent on our crumbling infrastructure, free education, and higher wages. The tax on the rich under Johnson was 91 percent. It is now 39.6 percent for those who pay, but most of the rich pay nothing, in fact. There are many corporations that the poor end up paying for their subsidies and who do you think makes up the difference in these tax rate that is less than half of what it used to be? We also voted in GOP people who retooled our war on poverty to a cynical war on crime and privatized a lot of our prisons. The term criminal came to mean...