What Tom's trying to tell you, Bowser, is that since there aren't enough rich people in the country, and since they don't make enough money (by his calculation, or those he can cite in the Warbucks press)then there is no reason why they should pay any taxes at all.

In fact, he says if the rich pay no taxes, they'll just rush out and invest it all in Job-Creating enterprises that will allow us all to time travel back to 1955. They almost got away with it during the Baby Bush administration, remember?

Unregulated capitalism started collapsing of it own weight back in the early 60s, and by the 80s it could no longer be denied except by those who were profiting by it. It just didn't happen all at once, and it wasn't immediately obvious what was happening. The system had an enormous amount of momentum, and was kept afloat long past its obvious time by debt (consumer, corporate and government, most of managed by Capital). And the capitalists know perfectly well what is happening and why. Why else are they investing overseas? They know there is no future here. They are doing to the USA what Bain did to numberless industries, and now they want to put Bain Himself in charge to finish the job right.

This is exactly what Marx predicted. The "degenerate stage" of capitalism, when its starts feeding on itself, when it begins to metabolize its own muscle mass. We have come to the time when the only profitable industry in the country is Finance and Banking, administering the debt, managing the death spiral. And even that is starting to cannibalize itself.

The hippies were right.