1. They Feel Powerless. They had power, and they lost it. They lost it, because the financial crisis gave Democrats big enough super-majorities to unmake Reagan's world. And unmake it they did. Dodd-Frank didn't get as diluted as they hoped, so it (along with higher capital requirements) might slowly suck profitability out of the big banks. Obamacare will take leverage away from bosses and give it to workers who no longer have to stay in jobs they don't like for fear of being uninsured. And, as a certain bearded Princeton economist points out, average federal tax rates for the "top 1 percent" are higher than they've been at any time since 1979. 

Sure, they saved the carried interest loophole for VCs, hedgies, and buyout titans—the Stalingrad of the 1 percent?—and sure, the rich can get Washington to talk about deficits nonstop. But they can't quite get Bowles-Simpson to fix the debt (and their taxes).

2. And They Might Not Ever Get Our Power Back. The tipping point might have already come and gone. America as they know it, a land where everyone dreams and can make it big if they work hard and have the right parents, is gone. The 1 percent knows America is now a nation of takers. Obamacare pushed them over the edge from Social Darwinism into dependency. Indeed, as Mitt Romney courageously pointed out, 47 percent of Americans only pay federal payroll, not income, taxes. This near majority that's falling as the economy recovers will soon become a majority. Then the populous will vote themselves more and more benefits, and tax the rich more and more to do so. Just as Ayn Rand predicted.

3. Now the Rich Are the Victims. American capitalism had a fantastic run, but now it's over. It died on December 14, 2009, a day that will live in infamy. That's when Obama said he "did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street."

For 25 years, politicians had understood that greed is good. That, as Perkins says, "it's absurd to demonize the rich for being rich and doing what the rich do, which is get richer by creating opportunities for others." That the best thing to do is to just cut taxes and regulations on the job creators—and then genuflect. Reagan did it, and markets boomed (median incomes didn't, but this is apparently besides the point). Clinton half-did it—he raised taxes but deregulated Wall Street —and everything boomed. And George W. Bush did it. I don't need to tell you how that turned out.

Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/arch...