Spreading the wealth by taxing the “rich”

A lot of political hay has been made out of an anecdote presented in the final debate. Senator John McCain cited a conversation that Senator Barack Obama had with a man in his driveway. You know this man as Joe the Plumber, and he asked if Obama’s tax plan would benefit him as a man going to purchase a small business that is worth over Obama’s tax-free ceiling. The answer Joe got was, “We need to spread the wealth around.”

By Shawn Conway

Senior Staff Writer

A lot of political hay has been made out of an anecdote presented in the final debate. Senator John McCain cited a conversation that Senator Barack Obama had with a man in his driveway. You know this man as Joe the Plumber, and he asked if Obama’s tax plan would benefit him as a man going to purchase a small business that is worth over Obama’s tax-free ceiling. The answer Joe got was, “We need to spread the wealth around.”

Why do people need to spread the wealth? Why do people who have worked for a better life need to be punished for succeeding? It’s not the job, or even in the enumerated powers, of the presidency to spread the wealth. But what might have been written off as a gaffe that led to cheap political theater was substantiated by the fact that he backed it up. Now after the release of a 2001 interview, it is clear Obama is for redistribution of wealth.

The other day, an interview was released in which Obama said, “The civil rights movement became so court-focused, I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and organizing activities on the ground that are able to bring about the coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change, and in some ways we still suffer from that.” Since this leaked, the Obama camp has denied that he advocates the redistribution, and that is not what he said or meant at all.

But you take this comment about suffering from not bringing “about the coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change,” with Joe the Plumber and it begins to paint a picture. But every picture needs a canvas to be painted on, and that canvas for this stretched metaphor is Obama’s tax plan.

To boil it down, Obama’s tax plan is to cancel the Bush tax cuts (ie. raise taxes on all people) and invoke his own tax plan. He says that no middle or lower class people will get their taxes raised, and anyone who makes over $250,000 will get raised taxes to pay for his programs. Instituting a rich tax because the rich can pay for it is a common belief of the Democratic Party.

But where Obama draws the line at “rich” has become hazy since the last debate. He revised the $250,000 mark to say that anyone under $200,000 gets a tax cut, and anyone over $250,000 gets their taxes raised. Then earlier this week Senator Joe Biden said that “it should go to middle class people, people who make $150,000 a year.”

If they keep moving the bar, where will it end up when they pass legislation? The high end of salary for teachers at my high school was just under $100,000. Do I consider my teacher with a spouse making $50,000 dollars a year to be “rich”? I think not.

I would make an argument that taxing the rich more because they are simply “rich” is going to hurt our already fragile economy rather than help it. Rich business owners, corporations, and other people that hold a large portion of the wealth like to make money, and they like making more of it. The way to do that is to invest it in the business and the stock market and grow that capital. That growth helps the economy for the rest of us and creates jobs. It’s not rich people that work at these corporations; it’s just the rich that run them.

Is poverty a problem? Yes. Can we do more to fix it and even the playing field? Yes. Do we owe it to those less fortunate to live a better life? Yes. But it’s not going to take a redistribution of wealth to achieve livable conditions for these people.

It’s going to take opportunity for them to get out. It is opportunity that was created with civil rights legislation. It is opportunity that was created through affirmative action. Now it will take a new plan to create opportunity for people who need it to get out of the lives they lead and start on the path of success. Giving everyone, rich and poor, money back will give them all the tools needed to succeed. After all, tax cuts were what this country was founded on.