David Neiwert, over at Orcinus, continues with excellent comments and links on the proposed national sales tax. Nothing Bush has proposed is as frightening as this. Pay attention. You will be tested on this.

Bush's Class War: Back to the Future

It's becoming increasingly apparent on a broad range of issues that the Bush administration intends to turn back the nation's social clock by a century or so. This is no more evident than in the regime's push to replace the corporate and personal income tax with a national sales tax. (...)

There is in some ways an appealing aspect to "turning back the clock." Indeed, many Americans are positively nostalgic for the "good old days." But the reality of everyday life for Americans in 1900 was not quite so golden. In fact, most Americans were by today's standards dirt poor, and the phrase "wage slave" was not merely a euphemism.

There were no limits on the length of the work week, and in fact the average laborer was often expected to put in between 60 and 80 hours of work per week. There was no such thing as overtime pay. Retirement plans were a distant fantasy. Child labor was very common. People of all sexes and all walks of life were so overworked, and their health care so marginal, that the average lifespan was 47 years (it's now 75). Life, in Hobbes' famous phrase, was "short, nasty and brutish."

That's the kind of world to which the Bush regime wishes us to return -- all for the sake of further enriching his fellow members of the wealthiest class of Americans.
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