Fed Reserve Report: Some States' Policies Accelerating Personal Income Divide

Domestic concern over America's widening personal income gap has gotten the Federal Reserve Bank's attention. A recent Fed research report, according to a Washington Post story, details states whose tax policies effectively increase the wealth gap between the have-a-lots, the have-somethings, and the have-nots. Regressive tax regimes typically form the heart of levies that hammer the poor and working classes. The dwindling middle class is now discovering the potency of regressive tax schemes (i.e., everyone pays equally, such as gasoline taxes).

The right-wing won't have an easy reply for these findings. GOP presidential candidates, for example, can't smear the Federal Reserve as a tool of class warfare and retain a shred of their credibility. As the draconian GOP regime Kansas has demonstrated, the Republican mantra of "tax cuts" leaves the civic body fiscally bankrupt and its citizens morally shamed. What the Republican Party doesn't really want to talk about is its implicit embrace of a two-class society, although Mitt Romney came close to articulating this position during his 2012 presidential campaign. The common sense reality is that those on the bottom will pay for the luxuries enjoyed by the top, through regressive taxes and give-to-the-rich tax cuts. That scenario sounds more akin to a banana republic than a confident democracy.