Ever since the last presidential debate, which is already forgotten with the exception of Joe the Plumber, both Sarah Palin and John McCain have been harping on Barack Obama's tax proposals as "wealth re-distribution". It's time that the left blogosphere, and the Obama camp, interpret this GOP code phrase for what it is - a dogwhistle that implies that "Barack Obama will give the poor, unemployed lazy niggers your money".
Harsh interpretation? Perhaps. But that's exactly how the PALIN / McCain campaign wants people to hear the phrase, "wealth re-distribution". The rest of the GOP machine has fallen into line with the talking points.
On the Friday night edition of Hardball, uber wingnut (and former GOP Gov. of Maryland) Bob Erlich came unglued...
Bob Erlich said the following:
Matthews: Do you really think Barack Obama is a socialist?
Erlich: He wants to make a social welfare state, which we have, which has come about since the New Deal, and wants to make that much larger. What he said recently is that you build the economy from the 'bottom up'. I don't know what that means...
"...this sort of 'class warfare', Chris, that was never really part of a JFK, Harry Truman, or Scoop Jackson Democrat Party..."
There's something that's been bothering me recently, and all of the "class warfare" rhetoric is burying a fundamental truth that the McCain campaign is completely ignoring. Hard economic choices are going to have to be made in the coming years by whoever is running the show. Neither McCain nor Obama are likely to be able to fulfill their tax promises after they get a look at the books. But who do I trust more to make those choices? Between the two major candidates, it's not even close.
After letting Erlich rant for a few minutes, Matthews asked Obama strategist Stephanie Cutter:
Matthews: What is your defense?
Cutter: Our defense is the facts.
In pushing the "wealth re-distribution" theme last week, the PALIN / McCain campaign repeatedly trotted out references to Joe the Plumber, and even brought out Joe himself in a few instances. Joe doesn't want his taxes raised (even though he's a tax deadbeat), and most certainly doesn't want any of his tax money that he does pay re-distributed to the lazy, the shiftless, or the ethnically-challenged.
The McCain narrative repeats ad nauseum that Joe Wurzelbacher is pursuing the American Dream. For many of us, the American dream has become a myth; a cruel hoax. A diarist on Daily Kos hit the nail squarely on the head:
...The American dream, it's no longer about creating a business you can hand down to your child, nor, even, about creating wealth you can hand down to your child (and that's a dangerous business, based on the great unhappiness I've witnessed among the handful of trust-funders I've known).
The American dream is the great lottery shot. It's public self-abasement on reality television.
And Joe the Plumber? He took it...
Mr. McCain, do you really want to talk about wealth re-distribution? How about the largest re-distribution of wealth in human history, that took place just over a month ago, bailing out the banking and financial industries on Wall Street? Corporate socialism? You betcha. In fact, it was closer to a) nationalism, and b) fascism. But the GOP's concept of wealth re-distribution is not merely limited the mind boggling Wall Street bailout. And it's been occurring since at least the Reagan era, but never at such a pace as during the last 7+ years of corporate raiding and GOP-inspired deregulation of the financial markets.
In 2006, Nobel Laurate Paul Krugman wrote (and please, go read the whole article):
...Not only can few Americans hope to join the ranks of the rich, no matter how well educated or hardworking they may be -- their opportunities to do so are actually shrinking. As best we can tell, pretax incomes are now as unequally distributed as they were in the 1920s -- wiping out virtually all of the gains made by the middle class during the Great Compression.
...A generation ago the distribution of income in the United States didn't look all that different from that of other advanced countries. We had more poverty, largely because of the unresolved legacy of slavery. But the gap between the economic elite and the middle class was no larger in America than it was in Europe.
Today, we're completely out of line with other advanced countries. The share of income received by the top 0.1 percent of Americans is twice the share received by the corresponding group in Britain, and three times the share in France. These days, to find societies as unequal as the United States you have to look beyond the advanced world, to Latin America. And if that comparison doesn't frighten you, it should...
Barack Obama's tax plan asks only the wealthiest 5% of Americans (those who earn more than $250,000 / year) to sacrifice for the common good - and even then, not that much. This emminently reasonable policy isn't socialism; neither is it "wealth re-distribution".
[Graphic: Washington Post, 6/9/2008]
Notice anything about McCain's plan? It's weighted pretty heavily at the top of the economic spectrum, and showers down little more than crumbs on Main Street - in fact, it goes in the opposite direction of the Obama plan, and results in a larger overall tax cut. Yet the PALIN / McCain campaign is still trying to bamboozle Ma and Pa Sixpack to vote against their own economic interests, and support wealth re-distribution to the mega-rich (at Ma and Pa's expense).
The working class has been sacrificing for years under Reagan - Bush - Bush policies. Even Bill Clinton didn't change that particular dynamic dramatically. After nearly 30 years of the "trickle down" experiment having been proven to be a fallacy, working class Americans who have been "trickled on" have become even more deluded in their pursuit of the "American dream". Joe Wurzelbacher is just the latest manifestation of that particular delusion.
Wealth re-distribution. It's been a one way street during 30 years of GOP corporate oriented governance and fiscal mismanagement. The rich have truly gotten richer; the poorer more poor.
The American dream has morphed from hard work, a decent wage, a comfortable home, and leaving our children better off than ourselves to hitting the lottery or winning American Idol. Even as the American dream has been outsourced overseas (or Enron'd), 30 years of GOP mismanagement has done little more than demonize those who can't make ends meet as "freeloaders", while the rich became much richer, and the ranks of the working poor became swollen.
Joe Wurzelbacher and Sarah Palin really do epitomize the American dream of the early 21st century. They both hit life's lottery (though Joe's fifteen minutes of fame, and his Hollywood publicist, will vanish much faster), and they both know it. 99.9999% of Americans will never have the chance that has been presented to Joe the Plumber and Bible Spice.
If Barack Obama's tax plan is socialist wealth re-distribution, then so be it. Color me a socialist.