No. Not Benghazi!!!! [I believe we have attained the four exclamation point threshold].
The French Revolution.
The class structure:
The nobles (first estate)
The clergy (second estate)
Everyone else (third estate)
The first 2 estates were largely tax exempt.
The economy was in tatters
-Unpaid for wars.
-Taxes went into the nobles coffers rather than to the State.
-Rampant corruption in the system.
-The banks refused to lend money to the State since the Moody's of the day had removed the triple A rating and reduced it to C.
-The peasantry were fed up with cake and rather more fed up of paying for the lavish lifestyles of the top two estates.
To try and solve the problem of a bankrupt treasury they decided to raise taxes; but on only one of the estates, can you guess which one?
You got it in one.
The third estate.
The rest as they say is history, and it got fairly messy.
I wonder if there are any parallels in our current plutocratic capitalist system?
Hmmm.
The Internal Revenue Service today released a new report showing that in 2010, as the nation’s stock markets recovered, the richest Americans saw their share of all national income rise and their effective federal income tax rate fall.
Goddammit I cant quite see it, could someone help me out here?
Hmmm
One thing I can prove, however, is that inequality makes a small number of people incredibly richer and a large number of people much poorer. In the United States, for example, ordinary Americans are about half as well off as they would be if America had the same level of inequality today as it did forty years ago.
Oh.
And austerity does bring pain. People lose jobs. People even go hungry. But some people — extremely rich people — don’t mind austerity at all.
These affluent Americans don’t send their kids to public schools. They don’t visit public parks. They never ride public transit. These wealthy folks don’t need public services and resent having to pay taxes to support them.
Gosh.
Con men, swindlers and cheaters pay bribes. Sophisticates hire lobbyists because lobbyists get better, more lasting results while only rarely landing in the slammer. We know intuitively that bribery and lobbying are related, and there are reams of academic papers that try to draw the line between legitimate issue advocacy and corruption
;-)