Here's a big surprise.

What a shocker. The New York Times (via CNN) reports that Bush's tax cuts have primarily helped the wealthy. No shit. Hello, like, the dude is a, y'know, Republican. The "theory" behind his cuts -- meaning the ideology used to cover the fact that Bush was doing nothing more than helping out his other elite friends -- was the same old "trickle down" crap, which is simply bastardized "supply side" economics. As Jake would say, "Isn't it pretty to think so?"

Unfortunately, a bit closer to reality is the increasing stratification of class. So if, as CNN summarizes the NY Times, "The newspaper's tax cut analysis showed that more than 70 percent of the tax savings on investment income went to the top 2 percent, about 2.6 million taxpayers," what that means is that 98% of taxpayers received a bit less than 30% of Bush's grandiosity. But wait, the Right cackles, having more disposable income means the wealthy will invest more, and greater investment will lead to more jobs, and everyone will be happy.

It's a beautiful theory, but it's less realistic than the hippies' idea that running around naked and smoking dope would change the world. Let me turn to Marx -- and say what you will about the fools who pretended to implement his theories, Marx's actual writings are fairly solid -- and the essay "Wage Labor and Capital" lays out the basic stratification that occurs through capital investment: even as wages rise or more workers are fed, the increased return on investment lifts the capitalists boat ever higher -- therefore the wage gap increases. Eventually you end up with two worlds, such as existed in Marx's time (think Zola's Germinal), and which the United States was partially able to ameliorate in the 20th century through a progressive tax system and worker protections that created a large middle-class.

And guess what...we're moving in that direction again as gated communities and private-security patrolled subdivisions seal off the well-to-do from rest of society and the notion of social responsibility collapses under the ever-increasing privatized and isolated lived experience of many people (the internet may connect people to one another but it results more often in flame wars than blogger happy hours).