...although most of that was figuring out the right search terms to get the one(s, plural) you're thinking of. Quite a few other people have made attempts, including attempts to continue these ones.

They appeared in an online comic strip by Dan and Tom Heyerman called Pants are Overrated in 2011. Between May and October 2011, four of the Pants are Overrated strips were tributes to Calvin and Hobbes taking place about 26 years after the end of the original. Calvin is in his early 30s, he's married Suzy Derkins, and they have a little girl named Bacon who's about the same age they were in the original.

The original site no longer has the content, though a posting from February says it's under construction to get it back up and running.

In the meantime I've saved copies to the Imgur account I use for when I want to post an image that I can't directly link to.

So here they are, with a bonus treat: Guess who was nightmare fodder in 2011!:



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...should be open for debate. The main goal is reversing what the 80s ushered in, that the highest virtue was shooting money skyward -- as much as possible, as fast as possible, as high as possible. Even with all the loopholes that let the well-off and wealthy avoid paying the top rates, the old high-level brackets put a damper in that upward geyser (and many of the loopholes still helped push money outward rather than upward). It was the 80s tax cuts and other policies that removed that damper and eliminated drawbacks to grabbing for every last dollar.

Back during the centennial of the Income Tax in 2013, the Tax Foundation put out a spreadsheet of historical tax rates (in both original and inflation-adjusted terms). Since "Is $250K/year 'rich'?" was still making the rounds in tax discussions (or blather, from some sources) and I know things had been very different pre-Reagan, I crunched some numbers and wound up focusing on the number and spread of brackets rather than the rates themselves.

For instance, here's the distribution of brackets from 1942 to 2013 (using 'married couple filing jointly' inflation-adjusted data):



I used 1942 as a start because in inflation-adjusted numbers spiked so far upward before then (and even more just before the Roosevelt administration but quickly came back to a less-astronomical top bracket boundary) that I would have needed to build a "skip" in the graph, and my Excel skills weren't up to that.

The compression of rates as you move forward in time is how inflation shows up in the inflation-adjusted numbers, and you can see when various tax reform efforts changed things. It wasn't until the mid-80s that tax brackets indexed to inflation and stayed relatively steady across years.

But look how far up the income spectrum those past brackets ran. To pick one year, "good old 1955" as the movie said, there were 24 brackets. Adjusted for inflation, 16 of them affected taxable income over $250K. Two thirds of all the brackets. 11 of those affected income over the equivalent of $500K. About 45% of the brackets. The top rate (91% that year) kicked in for taxable income over the equivalent of about $3.3 million.

Here's the yearly breakdown for total brackets vs number affecting inflation-adjusted income over $250K and $500K:


The reason I think raising awareness of these bracket spreads rather than the raw rates is because how it changes the framing and terms of the debate. Instead of going hammer and tongs over particular thresholds like $250K or $400K, it points up that there is a lot more room to maneuver. Historical bracket levels were wiped out in the 80s and have never returned. They should, even if the actual rates are open to debate.

https://driftglass.blogspot.com/2005/04/little-red-state-fundy-sez.html

From http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/blog/antichrist/

A little context: the cartoonist, Dave Willis, grew up in a strict conservative evangelical household, and Joyce, the little kid/older kid/young woman in this progression is something of an alter-ego of his about how that bubble bursts for some people, and of some of the hypocrisies that manifest in the people that never leave it.

...although less so among Americans, because it was before we got involved.

Gotta see if the real thing is available anywhere near me.

The policies of the Movement Conservatives who took over the party, and their wealthy backers/allies, aren't popular and couldn't get passed on their own merit. They want to restore the Gilded Age, where wealthy men had few if any impediments to doing whatever they wanted, and they liked the government they bought. They want to wipe out every law and policy put in place since the late 19th century that works for ordinary people.

How many votes would they get running on that?

Not many, so instead they promote rage and foam, but tried to keep it under control. Buckley gets a lot of credit for sidelining the Bircher leadership, but he and his crowd were hardly less extreme. They were just better at strategy. There was no hope of splitting, say, conservative Jewish voters away from the Democrats if the face of conservatism were people who reflexively spout anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

They still encouraged bile and foam from the general public. In the 70s they used early forms of data mining to identify hot-button issues that could be used to split New Deal-era voting blocks, foremost among them abortion and guns.

By the 80s they were driving the Rockefeller Republicans, who they considered quislings, to political extinction. They'd gotten the numbers they needed to not bother compromising.

All through the late 70s, 80s, and 90s they encouraged axe-grinding and played footsie with RW crusades in order to get votes. Newt Gingich and Frank Luntz tested and compiled radicalizing language and promoted its use by Republican candidates.

They scare-mongered and scandal-mongered and played to all the bigotries and pet peeves, and called it "playing hardball". They wanted to get conservative Republicans elected, and there was no part of that job that involved "dialing it back." They painted Democrats as supervillains: utterly-corrupt, moral degenerates out to destroy the nation and all that's good and holy to get their voters all hot-blooded and into the voting booth.

Their entire success has been built on not compromising. The closest they come is when they act to blunt or stall actions by Democrats until Republicans are back in the driver's seat again.

But the drawback is: When you paint the story that way, it's supposed to end with you bringing the bad guys to justice. They rot in jail, or better yet get hanged or fried. Blow up the Death Star. Drop the Ring into the fires of Mount Doom. The Enemy surrenders unconditionally and their symbols get blown up.


They turned the Party of Lincoln into the Party of Salome. Salome is the base, and she grew increasingly pissed that the establishment Herods weren't bringing her the heads she'd asked for.

They turned the Party of Abe into the Party of Ahab. Ahab is the base, who if their chests were cannons they'd shoot their hearts out like cannonballs to trigger the libs.

The built a base that wants this:

But never gets it.

When you tell that story for decades, continually amping it up to keep the audience's blood at a rolling boil, you create an expectation that you can never really deliver on. You can justify decades of investigations and re-investigations and re-re-re-re-re-re-re-investigations, but that's not going turn up anything that will hold up in court. So you put yourself into the position of portraying the other side as unbearably evil and an active threat, and then don't do anything about it. The base still has their hot buttons pushed, still believes every word of it, they just start thinking you're ineffectual at best, or more likely are part of the problem.