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SUNDAY. DECEMBER 30,2012 The fiscal cliff • • • of the 1932 By Sam Pizzigati Los Angeles Times Close your eyes in Washington these days and you can almost hear the echoes °t 1932. Eighty years ago, just like today, a fiscal crisis almost totally dominated the nation’s capital. Then, as now, fiscal conservatives demanded immediate action to fix a fed¬ eral budget awash in red ink. And then, as now, average Americans wondered why all the fuss about deficits. The Depression was in its third year, and mil¬ lions had no jobs. Why w ere politicians haggling about balancing the budget? Is history simply repeating? If so, bring that repeat on, with the same final result. That 1932 fiscal crisis produced an unex¬ pected, and stunning, watershed in U.S. history, the moment when America’s rich and powerful began to lose their lock grip on the nation’s political pulse. Elected leaders had until that moment essentially accepted the plutocratic per¬ spective. The Depression, the financially favored insisted, amounted to a natural disaster. Nature had to be allowed to run its course. The policy prescriptions that elected officials advanced in this political climate boiled dow n to appeals that the wealthy do the right thing. The wrong thing. President Hoover and congressional lead¬ ers of both parties agreed, would be any step that jeopardized “business confi¬ dence" in the nation. Veteran progressives, meanwhile, seethed. Congress was legislating “on fundamentals laid down in the age of the stagecoach,” declared Rep. Fiorello LaGuardia, R-N.Y. That lawmaking had concentrated “great wealth under the control of a few families” and left “large masses of workers entirely at their mercy.” That legislating had also left a hole in the federal budget. In the 1920s Congress had slashed the top income tax rate by two-thirds, down to 25 percent. By late 1931, the federal government, all.agreed, desperately needed to collect more reve¬ nue to function. But this new revenue, top Democrats and Republicans also agreed, must not come from the rich. Serious people under¬ stood, as Democratic Party Senate leader Joseph Robinson of Arkansas argued, that the government could only tax the rich so much “without discouraging investment and production.” House Speaker John Nance Gamer, D-Texas, stressed the same theme. He delivered what a Los Angeles Times dispatch would dub a "mild spank¬ ing" to his Democratic colleagues who had dared suggest boosting tax rates on high incomes. The nation could never meet its fiscal emergency by “soaking the rich," another Democrat, Charles Crisp of Georgia, added. Average Americans would have to "gird" themselves for “tremendous sacri¬ fices" a national sales tax or some other tax that demanded “backbone” from all Americans, he said. FROM 6A Letters 1 thought the constitutional assurance of a free press indicated an effort to establish fairness. 1 thought the concept of not being required to incriminate myself was a kinfolk of fairness. Our founding fathers put their fortune and their lives on the line because they saw that the King of England wasn’t treating them with fairness. I thought when we did some renovat¬ ing of our Constitution through the years to give women the access to the ballot box, and to give school atten¬ dance, the ballot box and other rights to black citizens that we were on a mission to add more fairness to our culture. I am a child of the people called the Greatest Generation. Those Americans knew Hitler was evil and because we are a nation of fairness, we went to war against him. Only in the mind of a “radical subset” of today’s conservatives is it not obvious that the concept of fairness shines out like a bright watermark on the pages of the Constitution. We have just concluded an election cycle where conservatives campaigned that women do not need to be treated fairly, where labor has been stripped of the mechanism to negotiate for fair working conditions, and campaigned on a promise to keep our current broken, unfair health care funding mechanisms. •I guess you didn’t get the news. We had an election. That guy who campaigned as though fairness was woven into the fabric of our Constitution ... he won the votes of the people. Thank you for confirming what I thought I picked up during the campaign season: Conservatives don’t have any affection for fairness. The White House agreed, in part. Hoover's Treasury Department asked Congress ,o enact new or higher federal excise taxes on many everyday purchases and services But Hoover, who was run¬ ning for re-election, would not go along with a national sales tax. He asked Congress instead to raise the nation’s top income tax rate from 25 percent to 40 percent. That infuriated William Randolph Hearst, the powerful media magnate andj" the most fervent advocate of the national* sales tax proposal. Hearst and his fellow— rich had no particular fondness for taxing sales. They simply wanted Congress to put in place an alternative to taxing income ... their income. The House Ways and Means Committee obliged and repudiated Hoover, passing instead a 2.25 percent manufacturer’s levy on everything but food. What happened next stunned Washington. Average Americans pushed back, bombarding Congress with angry complaints about the pending stab at a national sales tax. Rank-and-file Democrats in Congress quickly respond¬ ed. They joined with progressive Republicans and killed the conservative tax proposal. Amid House floor shouts of “soak the rich" the rebellious lawmakers then raised the top income tax rate from 25 percent to 63 percent. House Majority Leader Henry Rainey, D-111., sought to contain the damage. He went live on national radio and tried to convince Americans that the rich had sac¬ rificed enough. Law makers, Rainey pro¬ nounced, had raised income taxes on the wealthy “to the very breaking point " They had “soaked the rich.” In fact, the soaking was more a quick rinse. The revenue legislation Congress passed still depended heavily on excise taxes, many on everyday items. Even so, the 1932 tax fight marked a turning point. The rich reached for the brass ring, a national sales tax, and the people slapped them down. In New York, an ambitious governor took notice. Just two weeks after the tax battle, Franklin D. Roosevelt, a candidate for the 1932 Democratic presidential nomination, would begin a series of addresses that aligned his candidacy with the grass-roots push against plutocracy. “Do what we may have to do to inject life into our ailing economic order,” FDR would explain, “we cannot make it endure for long unless we can bring about a wiser, more equitable distribution of the national income.” The New Deal had begun. What will we begin? Sam Pizzigati edits Too Much, the Institute for Policy Studies' weekly on excess and inequality. This piece is adapted from his new book, "The Rich Don't Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900- 1970." P.S. You did a shoddy job of explain¬ ing Obamacare last week. Maybe anoth¬ er day we can describe it with ... fair¬ ness. Vernon Kuehn Cumming Letter policy The Forsyth County News wel¬ comes your opinions on issues of public concern. Letters must be signed and include full address and a day¬ time and evening phone number for verification. Names and hometowns of let¬ ter writers will be included for publication without exception. Telephone numbers will not be published. Letters should be limited to 350 words and may be edited or con¬ densed.The same writer or group may only submit one letter per month for consideration. Letters must be submitted by noon Wednesday for Sunday pub¬ lication. We do not publish poet¬ ry or blanket letters and generally do not publish letters concerning consumer complaints. Unsigned or incorrectly identified letters will be withheld. Mail letters to the Forsyth County News, P.O. Box 210, Cumming, GA 30028, hand deliv¬ er to 302 Veterans Memorial Blvd., fax to (770) 889-6017 or e-mail to editor@forsythnews. com. <a yf * f I SURE HOPE 7 1 GO OUT MORE if \l20l ’V GRACEFULLY THANTUIS in >v • x /' ■*:• ' ¥ ■ ft Jett Koterba The Omaha World Herald Resolutions to New Year's Day slips up on me sometimes and 1 haven't even taken the time to make resolu¬ tions. Of course, 1 skipped the whole pro¬ cedure last year, and the year before I broke so many resolutions the first week of the year, 1 said to myself, “What the heck.” I am always reminded of people who say that resolutions are made to be broken. Then 1 realize they had no intention of keeping them in the first place. If you are only waiting for the clock to toll the passing of the year so you can break promises to yourself, why bother making them in the first place. The No. 1 item on many lists usually begins with losing weight and getting more exercise. This year the desires of many hearts will be a job and a better econo¬ my. Needless to say, the pink slips will continue to arrive and the fiscal cliff if it is avoided will be only a temporary avoidance. Many people will again dread the life¬ changing circumstances and no amount of wish¬ ing will make any differ¬ ence for them. \ f 2013 e. Hope It’s Noteworthy! to all our many good friends and kind neighbors, we extend our warm wishes for a year that’s as special as you are! American Proteins 4705 Leland Drive q Cumming, GA 770-887-6148 www.americanproteins.com forsythnews.com | FORSYTH COUNTY NEWS re ! •K ■ JULIANNE BOLING Columnist We will hear people say they are glad 2012 is over while others may look at the world through their rose-col¬ ored glasses and see our leaders making life more difficult for many of us. We w ill hear the debates and the disputes of Congress and the legis¬ lative body in Georgia as they try to decide how best to help residents only to disappoint them once again with their indecisions and bad decisions. We will find we are mostly in denial of the life and health of our nation. We will hear the “experts” tell how gun control will solve kill¬ ings and prevent massa¬ cres of innocent people. We will hear them tell us how our health system needs to be changed only to find out mental illness is escalating and soldiers are not receiv¬ ing proper treatment for 7 A their problems. Making resolutions would be easy for me if I thought someone might take them up and follow them. 1 would resolve to always have truth in political situations; to have law makers make laws they must follow themselves; to make people accountable for their actions and not allow years of appeals to hamper the legal system. 1 would resolve to have less dissidence among state and local leadership and stop play¬ ing favoritism. I would resolve that all men and women are created equal in every country of the world. 1 would resolve to stop paying dictators any American funds they will stockpile into their personal coffers and neglect their people. There are so many things about which we could make resolutions. Maybe if we all made the same challenges to our leadership we might not need resolutions in the future. No, guess that wouldn’t work either. Cumming resident Julianne Boling's column appears each Sunday.