It's A Wonderful Life, For The Superrich

Last night I was watching George Bailey consistently stand up for the working class and immigrants and interfere with Old Man Potter's attempts to take over Bedford Falls, and it made me wonder, can anybody imagine such a movie being made today?

 Consider, in 1946, the top marginal tax rate was 86.45%, and Old Man Potter was a rich, greedy miser who wants to keep the poor in slums so he can charge them rapacious rents.  Dividends were taxed as regular income.  Today, the top marginal rate is 35%, and that equally hits people who make $300,000 a year and those who make $30,000,000 a year, while dividends are taxed at 15%.  Today, rich people are whining that they aren't getting enough respect for how much harder the supposedly work than all the little people, and they aren't appreciated enough as job-creating geniuses.  How did we get from 1946 to today?  I would suppose that after the Great Depression, people didn't feel like rich people were so impressive, and also that near universal service in World War II taught rich and poor alike that money didn't make people better, character counted for more. 

If a movie like "It's a Wonderful Life " came out today, how many hours of Fox News coverage would be poured into coverage of "the divisive class warfare and socialism promoted by Godless liberals in Hollywood?"  I would guess several hundred.  Rush Limbaugh would get in a huff about how jealous liberals hated good conservatives who worked hard, and wanted to steal from hard-working heartland conservatives.   It would be laughable.  Luckily, "It's a Wonderful Life" was made at a time when rich people didn't use the media to propagandize people about how they deserve all their "hard-earned" wealth.  I'm not one to claim that things were better back in "the good ol' days," but in this case, I think things were better for the working class back in the good 'ol days.  As for the rich, you have to go back to the 1890s to find good ol' days as good as today.