Hold on a second. Exactly what is wrong with “spreading the wealth”? Are those really dirty words?
The desperate McCain campaign is trying to score last-minute points by suggesting that a candidate who would “spread the wealth,” who would take your money and decide how to spend it, is somehow a dangerous radical, possibly even a socialist. No, Mr. McCain: Those are in fact practically textbook definitions of what a government does.
Think about it. We need roads, bridges, sewers, clean water. We need police, schools, meat inspectors. We need an army, emergency workers. Are individual citizens going to provide their own roads, bridges, and so on? Of course not. People give the government money – pay taxes – and the government decides how much to spend in each area. That’s the government’s role.
And “spreading the wealth”? This means, of course, that the rich chip in more than the poor. OK, let’s imagine a society where everyone pays equally, where there is no spreading of wealth. In round terms, each person’s share of the cost of government is $10,000 a year. If the burden were spread equally, that would mean a family of four earning $40,000 a year would just, well, send it all in to the Treasury and starve on the streets. If you take McCain literally, this is what he is advocating.
To put it bluntly, his “spreading the wealth” attack line is utter gibberish. Biden got it just right when, asked by a right-wing “reporter” if Obama was a Marxist, he replied incredulously, “Are you joking?”
All but the most rabid right-wing nutcases would agree that yes, the rich should ante up more. But merely taxing everyone at the same rate – which, mind you, still spreads the wealth, because if you make more, you pay more – would still leave some people hungry. That’s why there’s a graduated income tax. So the question is just how much more the rich should pay.
To answer that, you have to decide what kind of a society you want to live in. Income inequality has reached alarming levels, even crisis levels, with the glittering castles of the rich surrounded by tens of millions who are hungry and go without medical care. The right’s knee-jerk answer, as echoed in McCain’s call for even more tax cuts for the rich: the poor should pull themselves up by their bootstraps, get their act together, and lift themselves from poverty.
But look at it this way: No matter how hard people work, no matter what bootstrap revolution sweeps the land, there will always be people in the bottom 20 percent in income. Do we really want to live in a country where those people live in poverty? Are those our “values”?