My 96 hour ordeal in getting a prescription for my 85 year old mom........

[Hortensis]

70. And sadly yours, Doctor J. You might investigate,

understanding that the major media typically belong to giant business conglomerates mostly controlled by a relatively few families, most of whom oppose election of Democrats for protection of their fortunes.

In other words, I recommend turning off Fox and CBS, etc., and deepening exposure through reputable written media.

Please note that "reputable" rules out all right-wing sources that specialize in trying to keep Democrats from voting by feeding them endless, demoralizing lies about their own side. "Obama's term has been damaging to billionaires? Woosh goes your credibility." Exactly. You won't learn it from them.

I decided I should provide a jumpoff for encouragement so went and grabbed this quickly. Paul Krugman speaks only of tax hikes that wiped out 40 years of tax cuts for the very wealthy here, but Obama did a few other things too.

But the truth is that Obama’s election in 2008 and re-election in 2012 had some real, quantifiable consequences. Which brings me to those IRS tables.

For one of the important consequences of the 2012 election was that Obama was able to go through with a significant rise in taxes on high incomes. ... If Mitt Romney had won, we can be sure that Republicans would have found a way to prevent these tax hikes. And we can now see what happened because he didn’t.

According to the new tables, the average income tax rate for 99 percent of Americans barely changed from 2012 to 2013, but the tax rate for the top 1 percent rose by more than four percentage points. The tax rise was even bigger for very high incomes: 6.5 percentage points for the top 0.01 percent. ...

the available numbers are consistent with Congressional Budget Office projections of the effects of the 2013 tax increases — projections which said that the effective federal tax rate on the 1 percent would rise roughly back to its pre-Reagan level. No, really: for top incomes, Obama has effectively rolled back not just the Bush tax cuts but Ronald Reagan’s as well.

The point, of course, was not to punish the rich but to raise money for progressive priorities, and while the 2013 tax hike wasn’t gigantic, it was significant. Those higher rates on the 1 percent correspond to about $70 billion a year in revenue. This happens to be in the same ballpark as both food stamps and budget office estimates of this year’s net outlays on Obamacare. So we’re not talking about something trivial.

http://www.montereyherald.com/article/NF/20160104/LOCAL1/160109942

Btw, doesn't it strike anyone as strange that we don't all know perfectly well that the Democratic president we elected in 2008 and 2012 wiped out 40 years of tax cuts for the very wealthy, against the intense opposition of everything the other side could throw against him? How could we not know?

Go, Democrats!