Nicole Wallace, campaign flack for John McCain, just did an interview with NPR. Denouncing "spreading the wealth around," she said Obama's tax plan was like stiffing a waitress and giving her tip to a homeless person.
This is the short version of an email going around, in which the author confronts an Obama-supporting waiter. In the story, the writer stiffs the waiter (no guilt expressed), goes outside and gives $10 to a homeless person, who thinks it's a good deal. The waiter is left sputtering.
This sounds like an adaptation of a conservative joke into a first-person narrative. Obviously, Nicole Wallace got the email and found it supremely funny.
Do I need to point out the obvious? In a system of progressive taxation, especially one as mild as Obama's, the waiter/waitress isn't taxed very much to begin with. And John McCain, do we really begrudge social programs so much that we wouldn't give
any tax dollars to the homeless?
This is taking the analogy/story/joke on a literal level. The subtext isn't all that hard to get. Hard-working Americans are stiffed by the government, and their money is showered on poor people in the form of welfare. And the poor people are delighted.
You might have noticed that we have heard a lot about the middle class in this campaign (McC says "working class"), but almost nothing about the poor. In Republican world, the poor are morally bankrupt and lazy. They deserve what they get, because America is a land of limitless opportunity, if you just work hard enough. (One is in total control of one's destiny.) And governments shouldn't be in the business of helping free-loaders. Welfare just hurts people--as if any and all social programs designed to give lower income people a helping hand is welfare.
Government just screws things up anyway, they say. If someone is sick or homeless, it's up to private individuals and churches to help them out. Conservatives can feel good about themselves by participating in charity. I call it
noblesse oblige.
I think Obama has been mum on the subject of poverty simply to stay on the middle class message and not exacerbate the wacko socialism accusation, but that doesn't get him off the hook.
A lot of conservatives, even the Wall Street Journal, have been writing that 40% of Americans don't pay income tax. Poor. poor rich people who pay for everybody else! What these pundits are leaving out, and they very well know they're leaving out, is that everyone pays payroll taxes--and that's federal income tax.
Progressive taxation is not socialism, especially when the taxes on the wealthiest 5% are only rolled back to the levels of Reaganism. I'll post some more about the foundations of this principle later.
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