Of course Senators Kyl and Lincoln would want to weaken the estate tax - they're two of our congressional millionaires! And sometimes I think our congress members are REALLY playing Monopoly!

Of the 535 members of the Senate and House, 237 are millionaires - that's 44%.

Of the Justices on the Supreme Court, 5 out of the 9 are millionaires - 55%. And these Justices have just turned hundreds of multi-million dollar corporations into PEOPLE!!!!

What does that tell us: our "democratic" system is rigged against the middle class because the majority of our "leaders" are milllionaires!!! THIS IS NOT A TRUE REPRESENTATION OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE!!!!

Unfortunately for us working people, as long as we have a Congress overpopulated with such a percentage of millionaires who are constantly being fed "bribes" (lobbying) by the corporations that are now "people," we shouldn't expect anything else! Our country has now achieved the status of "PLUTOCRACY" (rule by the wealthy) and we should stop calling it a Democracy!

Is there any plausible reason why our millionaires should pay less of a percentage of an estate tax than the average citizen????? None whatsoever except that they have the power to make it happen.

"Preserving a strong estate tax is essential to ensuring that each subsequent generation has a chance to achieve the American dream. Without it, we have to ask ourselves, is the game hopelessly stacked? Should we even bother playing?"

Yes, the game is already hopelessly stacked!!! We should STOP pretending our country is a Democracy!!!

Taxes alone won't cut it. We need our jobs back.

The issue is this: Can the middle class be restored in a way that still profits the oil companies and the politicians who fend for them?

The answer is a resounding no!

Day in and day out, this blog is repleat with idealistic proposals like this one - and as we sit here blogging away, some NSA agent is electronically eavesdropping on our posts while chuckling at our naivete.

Restoration if the middle class is a small issue compared to the restoration of a livable environment. We are facing much greater problems than national economics. In an orgy of greed the rich want it all. The rich own congress, therefore, the middle class will systematically be separated from it's remaining wealth. To control people the rich want to dominate food and water resources. Some individuals are smart enough to defend against the rich and are forming the slow and locovore movements that increasingly stress cooperation, not competition. Even the slow movement will likely fail given global warming.

The super volcano at Yellowstone, already overdue in it's 640,000 year eruption cycle, will likely feel the stress of global warming on continental drift and the increased drift is leading to increased pressure. Today the dome over the volcano is rising. How much longer before it explodes? When it explodes a cloud of ash will cover the entire western part of the country making agriculture impossible. This ash is also predicted to affect the midwest as well. Realistically, responsible people must prepare for such an event. Washington will not help us and our States are behind the curve. It is up to you.

"Middle class" my ass. In my Green Party petetion circulating, the comfortable, smug, right-wing suburban "middle class" have hardly given me a single signature.

To get signatures, I go into town, to a grocery store that serves some of the poorest urban neighborhoods in my area. There, I get signatures from almost everyone I approach. Virtually all my signatures are from people I'd describe as poor or on the lower margin of the middle class.

"Middle class" is a code language word with considerable classist and racist overtones. The operative word is "worker" or "wage earner".

You cannot restore a vibrant middle class without restoring their opportunities for jobs and starting business's.

You cannot do that till we elect a President and Congress that aren't at war with Ameruica. That aren't attacking Americans at every turn. That follow their own narrow minded arrogant agenda.

The time for chosing sides is coming fast amnd I don't mean republican or democrat, green or sicialist.

If one is to investigate the political economic system as Marx did, one would see there is no such a class as the "middle class". Essentially there are 2 major classes within capitalist society. There are those who own the means of production - the capitalist class and those who can only survive by selling their labor power to the capitalist class - the working class.

The "middle class" was introduced by pro-capitalist economists as a means of splitting the working class, the same way that racism splits the working class.

The progressive movement must stop buying into the capitalist ideology. The call for preserving the middle class is just a means to divide the working class and introduce confusion when it comes to class solidarity and class struggle. The term "middle class" should NOT be part of our progressive language. It is neither scientific nor based on real class reality.

Do we want a "vibrant middle class in America" or do we want a new society where one class can no longer profit and get rich by exploiting the majority of citizens, the working class? When calling for a "vibrant middle class", what about all those below this so-called class? The pie is only so big and promoting the economic interests of just one section must come at the expense of others. Enough of the capitalist ideology!

"Our progressive tax system, including the estate tax, helped guide our economy and fuel the broadly shared prosperity our nation experienced during the post-war period."

That is partially true. Unsaid is the fact that up until the 1980s, the tax revenue earned was actually spent for worthwhile purposes compared to the 1980s and beyond.

I would also like to follow up on what mightymite said about starting businesses. An individual starting a small business in 1970 was far more likely to see that business flourishing until 1985. In sharp contrast, starting a small business in 2000 had a much smaller chance of lasting to 2005 let alone 2010 or 2015 thanks to 30 years of reckless policies of loosening the rules for the bigger companies while tightening the persecution noose on smaller ones. Even the books on the basics of accounting have changed significantly when I compare my grandfather's book on accounting to the one I had in college. Even today's books on finance and accounting for small businesses have their contents framed in ways that try to make their targeted readers believe that we must think really big or else we are economic "losers".

We won't have to worry about the middle class too much longer now that the right wing is in control of both parties. Obama's deficit commission will be the next big step in the program to impoverish what is left of the middle class and eventually the estate tax will go the way of abortion rights and be eliminated by forces within the democratic party.

Or, we could try to replicate the Victorian social structure: An upper class consisting of robber barons and the monied "leisure class", and a hereditary aristocracy-roughly 1% of the population, a 'middle class' consisting of lawyers, money managers, doctors and other 'professionals'to service that upper class- maybe 10% of the population, and the rest of us-some form of industrial grunt.But first we need to abolish public education, any form of social security (we night permit burial societies, though)and snuff out what's left of the union movement.And let's not forget permanently abolishing the inheritance tax. Democracy? Who needs it.

Back when Reagan was president and he was determined to do away with social programs to help the poor, his policies resulted in the development of "The New Poor". These were the lower middle class citizens, who were one paycheck away from poverty. They lost their jobs through no fault of their own but through the fault of the conservative belief that wealth trickles down to the people on the bottom. Like crumbs fall down from the table to the dogs. However when the rich got huge tax breaks they did not invest in America to give poor Americans jobs to raise them to middle class. Instead they took their tax break money to foreign lands where labor was cheaper and they could make obscene profits. In the meantime the new poor had to live on unemployment benefits and when they ran out they had to move into parents, relatives, or friends homes. America has been run by conservatives for decades and there is nothing new under the sun. The new poor are not really new. The difference is that Reagan did away with an adequate safety net.After all conservatives didn't want them to get spoiled and remain on welfare or unemployment benefits. Evidently this is what conservatives would do if the they were forced to accept assistance, stay on it and be lazy. There might have been some who did that but most of the people I knew, on government assistance, got jobs as soon as they were able. We need good government assistance programs such as job training,housing,food cards,transportation,child care, living wage jobs ect.. to help the poor Americans reach the level of middle class. It is not the mythological welfare queens that ruined the economy it was the subsidized corporate welfare kings who got big tax breaks to produce jobs then took the money to places like China or Swiss Banks.

It was the middle class that fought and beat back the Nazi and the Japs. Slick Willie gave the middle class Nafta and the destruction of the middle classes. Slick Willie never served his country in any way unless you think collecting hundreds maybe millions of dollars for speeches is serving your country.
Who will tell the people?

I agree with the posts above that offshoring so many jobs is missing from this analysis, but can't deny the progressive tax structure enabled building the economy for many years.

What goes around comes around. The average third world factory worker can't afford cars and appliances. Neither can laid off American workers. The Tea Party types will rail against "entitlements" and unions as they are disenfranchised one by one, because fewer and fewer people can afford their services. Real Estate, stock and bond holders will see their portfolios crumble as the economy withers and Wall Street banksters rob them.

Lets hope for a soft landing in the third world. On the bright side, it will be an opportunity to build an environmentally sustainable global economy.

The original American reference to a "middle class" probably comes from Britain. It referred, as on the continent, to the propertied but untitled yeomanry of the countryside, the rising burghers in the cities, and the mercantile classes as a whole. It was an accurate naming. What was to become the bourgeoisie really did originally stand between the aristocracy and the property-less classes.

The next stage in this evolution was the rise of the absolute monarchies with the former middle class becoming a major, and sometimes equal, pillar of the state, alongside the aristocracy (the "Third Estate" in France, as an example). In Britain, this evolution was stillborn in many ways because the British bourgeoisie came to power much earlier than in many other countries (in the Civil War of 1648). The English bourgeoisie followed regicide with a “restoration” of a slavish monarchy, and then merged the old aristocracy with itself. Large estates became alienable, titles could be bought and sold, and the monarchical institutions became largely ceremonial. In turn, the middle class "gentlemen" of the 18th century really were an income tier - possessing enough property to avoid the coarser trades but lacking the wherewithal to buy title and transcendence. The Americas were colonized by such... or at least the local power descended from such.

At this point, the meaning of middle-class diverges. On the Continent, the middle-class came to be a description of the mass of small property holders, owning their own means of production but typically employing only their own labor or perhaps a handful of others and even that, often seasonally. This is the infamous "petite-bourgeoisie" and it owed its infamy to its instability. Aspiring to raise itself within the ranks of the property owners on the one hand, it was continuously expropriated and diminished in numbers on the other. The story of the next 100 years of European history is precisely that story.

In Britain, a similar process transpired, but with two counteracting influences. Just as in Europe, the lands were "cleared" and the small holders were expropriated, but at the same time the British mercantile monopolies bore fruit. A worldwide colonial empire was transformed into the engine of capital accumulation and its essential product was the industrial revolution. In both cases, it was not just a vast army of proletarians who were created but also a sea of unusually skilled “labor aristocrats”, specialists, managers, colonial officials, minor civil servants, and professionals of every type and description. This was more a new social stratum than a class, but it echoed some of the perspectives of that which came before it, and it was dependent on and wedded to the social system of Empire. It was not so much that the proceeds of Indian labor went to London bank clerks, as it was that Indian banks were located in London… certainly their management and their hierarchy of favored positions was located in London. This is the genesis of the transformation of the British middle-class, from a continental to an Imperial definition.

That British middle-class, the source of endless political stability and social philistinism, lasted as long as the Empire and industrial ascendancy did. The bankruptcy of that Empire after WW2 and its rapid dismantling also ended the rein of middle-class politics. Politics, in turn, was just a reflection of the decomposition of the “class”, itself. While middle-class nostalgia was producing Thatcher Tories, the British standard of living was falling to the same level as that of Italy or Portugal. Today, few such illusions remain, although a “New” Britain has risen in the nexus of EU and American economics.

With this allegory in mind, it is possible to look at America. While, the origin of the term may be British, for most of its history, the American middle-class went by a Continental definition. America was a “middle-class” country from its inception… built on “free” land (in the dual sense… i.e. also “freed” from its former inhabitants). As late as the decades after the Civil War, 70% of the population owned their own means of production, even if it was modest in most cases. The subsequent transformation of that status was partly the operation of the very same forces as we have already described and partly the result of the flood of European immigrants, recently freed from their property. In approximately 60 years, the population of freeholders fell from 70% to less than 10%. It is less than 5% today, once the various tax schemes and contractor rackets are abstracted away. The story of America before the War is the story of The Grapes of Wrath and in no way could the U.S. be accurately described as a “middle-class country”.

So what has changed, since? Was it FDR, the New Deal, Democrats… a new “Enlightenment” perhaps? In fact, it was a positive outcome to the Second World War. What Britain lost, the U.S. inherited. And among that inheritance was a new definition for “middle-class”, adopted from the English. Social mobility, the movement up the division of labor, a certain level of prosperity, advancement through education… and all of it made possible from industrial ascendancy and the fact that Indian banks were now located in New York. The end of that era comes with globalization. It makes little difference whether the new era produces a new capitalist competition or whether the very success of American Empire relocates Indian banks to India. The inevitable result will be the decomposition of the American middle-class and there is not a single political perspective which promises otherwise. It is the division of misery in the decline that is in question.

All attempts to paint the existence of the middle-class as an aspect of “politics” or policy, positively or negatively, are simply wrong. The "middle-class" is a historically created, changing, and ultimately decomposing social structure which is no more a permanent part of America than Conestoga Wagons or the railroads.