As agitprop goes, this little cartoon, Tax the Rich: An Animated Fairy Tale, from the California Federation of Teachers is quite good. I disagree with some of it. In particular, it greatly understates how much the middle class self-oppresses. I’m well aware of how the Tea Party was largely a marketing campaign from the rich. But there was lots of grassroots organizing that went along with it. There are still a lot of people who think that the financial crisis was caused by the government forcing Fannie Mae to give loans to poor people. And it isn’t just that Fox News has pushed this canard ad nauseam. It is that there are a lot of people who want to believe it.

The cartoon also implies that the rich are so much richer just because they game the tax system. If that were our only problem, there would be reason for much hope. Unfortunately, the rich are able to game just about every aspect of the government, so they are way ahead long before it gets to taxation. In fact, if we treated capital gains as regular income and raised the top marginal tax rate up to 70%, I think the rich would still be getting a large and unfair advantage from the government.

But watch the cartoon; it’s good. And it’s being attacked by Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson. So there’s that.

H/T The Daily Kos This Week in the War on Workers