What’s there to say about AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka other than he adequately fits the bill of “union goon.”  Barack Obama is so adamantly pushing his wealth envy campaign because it plays right to the tune of labor unions.  When you read or listen to the following statements by Richard Trumka, if you didn’t know who was saying them you could safely assume that they were being read from a teleprompter by none other than our Dear Ruler.  The rhetoric is virtually interchangeable.  In an interview with Bret Baier on Fox News about Obama’s jobs plan, specifically the tax increases included in the plan, here’s what Trumka had to say …

Trumka: “The rich have been getting away with a lot for a long time.  They haven’t been paying their fair share.  If we’re ever going to get out of hole, if we are ever going to reduce the deficits and create jobs, they have to pay their fair share and now is the time to do that.”

So there you go.  It’s clear that ‘Trumka got his memo from Dear Ruler and is wholly committed to the class warfare blueprint for Obama’s reelection.  

As I’ve pointed out before .. we’ve seen a not-so-subtle change in the rhetoric from these libs and progs.  At first they chanted that the goal was to get the evil rich to “pay their fair share.”  Now, over the past few weeks, the rhetoric has changed.  You can imagine how the memo from the Obama campaign read:

Yup .. that’s pretty much the way the memo must have read.  So we’ve now moved beyond the idea that the rich “need to pay their fair share.”  We are now at the point where the rich aren’t paying their fair share and we need the government to come along and force them to buck up.  Trumka got the memo … and now he’s saying “They haven’t been paying their fair share.”  Good boy Mr. Trumka!  Here’s your treat!  

I know you are sick of these figures by now.  The top 1% of taxpayers earn about 20% of the income but pay about 38% of all revenues.  For the top 10% of taxpayers, they pay around 68% of all federal income taxes.  And Trumka says that they’ve been getting away with this for a long time?  Let’s take a little journey back into the history books and see exactly how much those evil rich people have paid in taxes over the years.  These numbers come from Stephen Moore, a senior economics writer for the WSJ editorial board and a policy analyst for the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation.  He says .. 

In the early 1960s, the highest marginal income tax rate was a stunning 91 percent. That top rate fell to 70 percent after the Kennedy-Johnson tax cuts and remained there until 1981. Then Ronald Reagan slashed it to 50 percent and ultimately to 28 percent after the 1986 Tax Reform Act. Although the federal tax rate fell by more than half, total tax receipts in the 1980s doubled from $517 billion in 1981 to $1,030 billion in 1990. The top tax rate rose slightly under George H. W. Bush and then moved to 39.6 percent under Bill Clinton. But under George W. Bush it fell again to 35 percent. So what’s striking is that, even as tax rates have fallen by half over the past quarter-century, taxes paid by the wealthy have increased. Lower tax rates have made the tax system more progressive, not less so. In 1980, for example, the top 5 percent of income earners paid only 37 percent of all income taxes. Today, the top 1 percent pay that proportion, and the top 5 percent pay a whopping 57 percent.

Wow, those rich people sure have been “getting away” with paying more taxes as the year goes by.  

But back to the Trumka interview.  Bret Baier actually proposes these tax figures to Trumka, which is something that I know many of you have been begging journalists to do when these libs and progs come up with this “fair share” line.  So here’s how that worked out:

Bret Baier: “Well the IRS says that 1% of households pay 38% in federal income taxes, the top 10% of households pay 70% of federal income taxes.  And then you have the estimate that roughly 47% of households pay zero federal income taxes, so that not paying their fair share?”

Trumka: “Well I think they are paying a less share of them then they have been in the past.  There are more of the loopholes that have been built into this thing, you have corporations that are paying less, you have rich people who are paying less.  Look, they are paying less now then they did when Bill Clinton was creating hundreds of thousands of jobs every month.”

Unfortunately Trumka’s answer #1: doesn’t answer the question and #2: doesn’t hold water.  First, Trumka’s answer seems to imply that at one point, the rich must have been paying their fair share because they are now paying less than they were in the past.  This is untrue, but I’ll get to that in a moment.  So if he doesn’t tell us what’s fair, the only thing we really have to work with is the fact that he seems to be OK with the “fairness” achieved under Bill Clinton.  There’s only one problem for Trumka … the rich paid less in federal income taxes to the government under Clinton than George Bush!

Go to the IRS website and add up the numbers for yourself. During the eight years of the Clinton Administration the Federal government collected a total of $5.66 trillion dollars in individual income taxes. During the eight years of the Bush Administration the Federal government collected approximately $7.45 trillion dollars in individual income taxes. The rich - that is, the top 1% of taxpayers - not only forked over a trillion dollars more to Uncle Sam under Bush than under Clinton, their share of the income tax burden increased from 33% to 38%. (Real Clear Politics)

Oops!  In fact, if Trumka is so distraught over revenues and the need to bring down our deficits, he should note the following: 

The Congressional Budget Office reports that, since the 2003 tax cuts, federal revenues have grown by $745 billion—the largest real increase in history over such a short time period. Individual and corporate income tax receipts have jumped by 30 percent in the two years since the tax cuts.

Now the problem is that Bush doubled the size of our government, so these revenues were spent and then he spent money we didn’t even have.  But that is a different story.  

But as if that wasn’t enough to prove that Trumka is full of dogsqueeze, Stephen Moore again has run the figures to estimate how much the rich would have paid without the Bush tax cuts … looks like our imperial federal government would be in an even bigger world of hurt without the increase in revenue thanks to the Bush tax cuts … 

I examined the Treasury Department analysis of how much the rich would have paid without the Bush tax cuts and how much they actually did pay. The rich are now paying more than they would have paid, not less, after the Bush investment tax cuts. For example, the Treasury’s estimate was that the top 1 percent of earners would pay 31 percent of taxes if the Bush cuts did not go into effect; with the cuts, they actually paid 37 per­cent. Similarly, the share of the top 10 percent of earners was estimated at 63 percent without the cuts; they actually paid 68 percent.

These libs and progs and union goons can’t tell you what is “fair” because there is no logical reasoning behind their arguments for paying your “fair share.”  You can’t debate ignorance.  

And while we are highlighting the brilliance of union goons, check out this organizer from the SEIU by the name of Stephen Lerner.  He says that workers need to "create a crisis for the super rich."  Gawd help us.