Win/Lose or Win/Win

The basic dispute between the two parties during this election cycle is whether or not the "success" of the upper one percent comes at the cost of the success of the other 99%.

Of course, the question is more nuanced than this. We are really talking about the success of the upper 10 or 20 percent, which is where the huge slice of the pie is eaten.

Watching Downton Abbey, it is very clear that when an aristocracy controls so very much of the economy, the castle, the town, all the cottages, and even the churches, there is very little left for the common folk, who are then grateful to grovel for menial jobs, brushing their masters' shoes, making their ladies' beds and driving their masters about in their masters' cars.

And we can see even the most benign overlords, like the Earl of Downton, is still part of what keeps the vast majority in servitude.

We have the Republicans and those who support them, from Joe Sixpack to the local garage owner, who say the rich have made their money fair and square and their being rich has not made my life harder, except it reminds me, watching them drive by in their fancy cars, watching them at play or driving by their mansions, how far I am from having made it. But I realize, that is, as Romney says, the politics of envy.

And if the pie were infinitely expandable, or expanding, then the rich could have all the pie they want, as long as there is enough left for the rest of us.

But, it is beginning to look as if the way the rich get that way almost always means their gain is our loss. They don't pay taxes, and they accumulate so much wealth the national economy begins to look like a board game of monopoly, where the winner has so many hotels and so much property, the rest of the players find themselves struggling to just get round the board, watching their own supply of money depleted, paying for every space they land on, then money making the rich richer and preventing the poor from buying a single hotel to set down on Park Place.

But financial finagling is a slippery and arcane subject. Joe Sixpack cannot appreciate how it works. I know I can't quite get a handle on it.

I do know that when Mitt Romney does not have to draw a salary, when he can live on a source of income I didn't even know there was a word for--special dividends or what not, I've got a problem.

And you know when the Republicans cling to the line that there is no way they are willing to raise the taxes on the rich, if only back to the Clinton era level, despite the obvious black eye that gives them, despite being unable to justify it, they must be bought and paid for. It means all our suspicions about the phoniness of their howl about the danger of the deficit is just so much deception, because if the deficit really were so dangerous, the Republicans would be willing to do anything, even taxing their patrons, to get the country out of it.