From the San Francisco Chronicle
Dems try harder on tax hike for rich: They hope for new ending to their old script
By Joe Garofoli
Democrats and Republicans have re-enacted the same one-act political play for decades. It opens with Democrats proposing to raise taxes on the wealthiest individuals or major corporations. Republicans deride the effort as an attempt to provoke "class warfare" - and Democrats back down. Curtain....
"Americans don't like to think in classes the way that Europeans do," said Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the UC Berkeley School of Information who has tracked how the public use of the phrase "class warfare" spikes whenever a new tax pops up. "It's seen as an offense to American egalitarianism."...