Corporations are Us: Class Warrior Rand Paul Lies about Poor People

A few weeks ago at a “town hall” meeting at a country club, Rand Paul told the assembled:

“Raising [taxes on super-rich Americans] probably won’t bring any more revenue,” Paul said. “You want to raise tax rates, you want to punish the rich. Well, the rich are the ones hiring us, the rich are the ones creating the jobs.”

Those Rich People sure are poor babies. One’s heart really must go out to them.

In his pre-rebuttal to the President of the United States and the Jobs Plan, Rand Paul again invoked the poor tale of the put-upon Super-Wealthy, chiding Barack Obama:

I don’t think it’s good for you to simply say it’s the rich, blame the rich, the rich are not paying their fair share.

Indeed. Rand does not think.

Back in June, Rand went on FOX News and there he did think:

“I think the politics of class envy aren’t what most Americans are interested in. Most Americans realize we live in the most mobile society ever known to man. Really a significant amount of the people who are in the bottom part of the socio-economic ladder through their lifetime make it into the upper echelons. It is really one of the great aspects of America. So for him to vilify people who make a lot of money, even those of us who don’t make a lot of money know that we work for people who make more money than we do, that punishing them actually may put a damper on and may threaten or jeopardize our job.

….The other thing about the class warfare, the politics of envy is that it mistakes that Big Corporations are other people. Corporations are often us, you know, if you have any retirement money that you put into a 401k or an Ira, you buy Corporations and you’re part owner. So if we punish those Corporations, we punish all of the individuals who invested in those corporations and the people who work for them.”

This argument of course expands upon the recent Supreme Court decision affirming that Corporations are themselves People so that now we can understand Corporations to actually be collectivist usurpations (or are they benevolent expressions?) of our monadic individuality.

Anyway — Rand Paul thinks that people so rich they are forced by society to fly around in private jets shouldn’t be taxed because if we are mean to the poor Rich People then the poor Rich People will take it out on us (which would make sense if it wasn’t the case that over the past decade we’ve been especially nice to Rich People and they have punished America for it).

So it was that Tuesday, as the Census Bureau announced staggering new poverty data, Rand Paul continued his Class Warfare, his politics of avarice, and re-iterated that the Poor don’t have it bad at all because one day very soon, they too will all be Super Rich:

PAUL: We also need to understand that poverty is not a state of permanence. When you look at people in the bottom 5th of the economic ladder — those at the bottom — only 5 percent are there after 16 years. People move up, the American dream does exist…The rich are getting richer, but the poor are getting richer even faster.

That all seems perfectly unreasonable. Take it away ThinkProgress:

First of all, then notion that the poor are getting richer faster than the rich requires an impressive level of ignorance. Currently, income inequality in the United States is greater than that of Pakistan and Ethiopia and higher than at any other time since the Great Depression. Indeed, thanks to exceedingly low tax rates, the rich are getting richer, with the richest one percent earning nearly 25 percent of the total income in the country.

Meanwhile, nearly one in three middle-class Americans is slipping down the income ladder as an adult. And with stagnant wages and the purchasing power of the minimum wage at a 51-year low, it’s hard to see how suddenly “the poor are getting richer faster.”

What’s more, Paul’s overwhelming deluge of pseudo-evidence to downplay the connection between poverty and poor health cannot shake incontrovertible facts. As the American Journal of Public Health found, deaths resulting from poverty, income inequality, and low social support each totaled more than homicide deaths in 2000.

Well shit. That’s not good information at all. It’s actually down right bad… because it’s so damn mean to Rich People. Rich People won’t stand for this aggression. Rich People will punish us. Rand Paul is trying to warn us.

[h/t Mr. Sonka]