The 99 percent movement protests are going global as more and more people seek to register their frustration with corporate greed and injust economic policies. Preferential tax treatment has helped drive the U.S. to its worst level of income inequality since the Great Depression, with the nation ranking more unequal than the Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, and Pakistan. Since 1979, “the gaps in after-tax income between the richest 1 percent of Americans and the middle and poorest fifths of the country more than tripled.”

America’s recognition of the indisputable level of inequality is forcing Republicans to back away from their condescending treatment of the “Occupy” protesters. Once concerned about these “growing mobs,” House Majority Eric Cantor (R-VA) is making an about-face. Today on Fox News Sunday, he told host Chris Wallace that the president and Republicans “agree that there is too much income disparity in this country.” Pointing to the public’s “complaint” about the unfair economic playing field, he insisted that Congress should rely on America’s wealthy “to take care of income disparity”:

CANTOR: We know in this country there is a complaint on the folks on the top end of the income scale that they make too much and folks on the end don’t make enough. We need to encourage those on the top income scale to create more jobs. We are about income mobility and that’s what we should be focused on to take care of the income disparity.

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Relying solely on the wealthy to reduce income inequality seems woefully out of touch with reality. Numerous corporations are sitting on enormous profit, paying more to their CEOs than in taxes. Last year, CEO salaries increased by 27 percent while private worker wages increased by only 2 percent. This pattern will hardly help address the disparity.

What’s more, any concern that Cantor and Republican lawmakers have about income inequality seems to be about maintaining it. Cantor voted to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, tax cuts that “actually increased economic inequality by delivering more than half of their benefits in 2010 to the top 10 percent of earners, who make over $170,000 a year. In fact, 38 percent of the dollar benefits went to the top 1 percent of earners.” He champions (and co-sponsored) a reduction in the capital gains tax, another policy that helps drive income inequality.

These are just a few of the many positions — including promoting tax increases on the middle class while protecting the preferential treatment of the wealthy — that have driven the disparity he suddenly seems to care about. There’s no question that inequality is in need of attention, as increasing income inequality effectively suffocates economic growth. But if Cantor is serious about addressing this issue, he’ll have to change nearly all his policies to do it.

2012 GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain has risen in the polls recently, and his 999 tax plan was the star of the GOP primary debate last week (with the number nine warranting 85 different mentions). But more and more analysts are pointing out that the plan entails a big tax increase on low- and middle-income Americans, while it would cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans.

Cain has vehemently protested that his plan would raise taxes on the poorest Americans (in part by saying they will just shift their consumption to used goods, which are exempted from his proposed nine percent sales tax). But today, Cain finally admitted to NBC’s David Gregory that some Americans would, in fact, pay more in taxes under his plan due to the sales tax. But Cain think those people will demand that 999 get implemented anyway:

CAIN: There is a huge amount of public support for 999. Just talk to anybody. This is what’s going to help us get it passed. The public support.

GREGORY: I just want to break that down. So you’re acknowledging this morning, which I haven’t heard you do before, that there are individuals who are going to pay more in taxes.

CAIN: There are some, yes.

GREGORY: And you think those people are going to rally around tax reform where the wealthy pay less and middle-class and lower-income folks pay more.

CAIN: Yes.

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As we’ve noted, because low-income Americans spend almost all of what they earn, while the wealthy do not (and earn a significant amount of their money from investments, the income from which goes untaxed entirely under 999), Cain’s plan will be a massive shift in the tax burden down the income scale. Of course, as Cain has explained, the poor could always just buy used food in order to lower their tax rate. And evidently he believes Americans will be so overjoyed at the prospect of higher taxes that they will flood the streets to demand them.