The Democratic Party has lost its way.   The party of the New Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society has become almost a mirror image of the GOP during the last thirty plus years, especially under the Clinton and Obama administration and weak Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill. 

It used to be the party of the common good, the people's party, the party of the worker, but now is almost indistinguishable from the GOP, protecting and indulging the wealthy few, the corporatocracy.

DINOs in the White House and Capitol Hill have helped exacerbate the economic inequality and tax unfairness currently rampant in this country doing their damnedest to ensure that the filthy rich get richer and escape paying their fair share of taxes.

Digby posts this today: "If I were you, I would print out this post by Felix Salmon and pull it out whenever you confront some bozo who's railing about the deficit and insisting that we have to put old ladies on a cat food diet to fix the problem:

* Federal taxes are the lowest in 60 years, which gives you a pretty good idea of why America’s long-term debt ratios are a big problem. If the taxes reverted to somewhere near their historical mean, the problem would be solved at a stroke.

* Income taxes, in particular, both personal and corporate, are low and falling. That trend is not sustainable.

* Employment taxes, by contrast—the regressive bit of the fiscal structure—are bearing a large and increasing share of the brunt. Any time that somebody starts complaining about how the poor don’t pay income tax, point them to this chart. Income taxes are just one part of the pie, and everybody with a job pays employment taxes.

* There aren’t any wealth taxes, but the closest thing we’ve got—estate and gift taxes—have shrunk to zero, after contributing a non-negligible amount to the public fisc in earlier decades."

Sam Pizzigati writes at Our Future about how a once secret report released by the National Archives shows the incredible,current coddling of the rich by both parties and government.

"Officials at the Archives have just released a 67-year-old U.S. Treasury Department report that places America’s current tilt toward the rich in eye-popping historical perspective.

"For this new perspective, we have President Franklin D. Roosevelt to thank. Back in 1943, with friends of the fortunate in Congress doing their best to ease the war-time tax burden on America’s wealthy, FDR asked the IRS to research how many taxpayers were making over $67,000, about $1 million in today's dollars.

"The newly released 1943 data make for absolutely stunning reading. We have simply never had clearer evidence of just how much America used to expect out of individual wealthy Americans — and just how little, by comparison, we expect out of our wealthy today.

"We learn, for instance, that 1941's top executive at IBM, Thomas Watson, collected $517,221 in compensation that year, about $7.7 million in current dollars. Watson paid 69 percent of his total 1941 income in federal income tax.

"Last year, today's chief exec at IBM, Sam Palmisano, took home $24.3 million for his executive labors. We don’t know how much income above that sum Palmisano reported in 2009, or exactly how much of that total he paid in taxes.

"But we do know that the 13,374 Americans who reported incomes over $10 million in 2008, the latest year with IRS stats available, paid an average 24.1 percent of their taxable incomes in federal income tax.

"America's wealthy faced an 81 percent tax rate on income in the highest tax bracket. That top rate would move to 88 percent on income over $200,000 in 1942 and 94 percent in 1944 and 1945.

"Today, by contrast, the top marginal rate in the U.S. tax code sits at just 35 percent. If Congress lets the Bush tax cuts for income over $250,000 expire the end of this month, the top rate would move to 39.6 percent in 2011, still less than half the top rate in effect 70 years ago at the start of World War II."

Pizzigati concludes with the following:

"Democracy cannot be safe, President Franklin Roosevelt warned Congress in 1938, “ 'if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself.' ”

"The richest 1.5 percent of Americans, FDR would go on to note in that 1938 message, were raking in as much income as everyone in America’s bottom 47 percent combined.

"Our contemporary super rich, research from Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez documents, are actually taking home a substantially higher share of America's income than their counterparts back in FDR's time.

"Americans of FDR's time worried deeply about the concentration of economic power. Today, 70 years later, we have cause for concern even greater."