Tax the Poor to Save the Rich

I had a conversation last summer with a dear friend, a very wealthy physician who also owns another, non-medical business. (I’ve probably mentioned this before on this blog.) It was a depressing conversation, as I recall, because most of what he was saying consisted of Fox News’ talking points about how rich people like him are being “punished” for their “success” by “our socialist president” and thus being “forced” to “subsidize” the lazy and undeserving poor.

He predictably advocated the “flat tax,” i.e. the national sales tax, to replace the income tax. I tried to explain to him that this would, to use his word, “punish” the poor, because of inter alia the declining marginal utility of money. His only reply was that the poor are “subsidized,” so they can’t be hurt economically anyway.

As depressing as it was to hear a rich man (let alone one whom I love and respect as a friend) show such resentment for the poor, I couldn’t get him to understand that, no matter how one sliced it, what he was advocating was a system by which he would pay less, and those less-well-off than he, and less able to afford it, would pay more.

This is where we on the left reach a cul-de-sac with the right, because the next step in the conversation is the rich are rich because they deserve it, and the poor are poor because they deserve it, and that it’s wrong to take more from the deserving than we do from the undeserving just because the latter were too lazy and stupid to become rich themselves.

I think most people who think this way have never been poor, just as most people who are against universal health insurance have never needed health care and not been able to get it; most people who are categorically against abortion have never been impregnated by rape or incest or had that happen to a loved one.

What the GOP is now doing, in the face of overwhelming evidence that its policy of taking money out of the economy and directing as much of it as possible into the hands of the Fortune 500 does not produce any economic benefits for anyone else, is giving people a way to feel good about their own greed, selfishness and cruelty. They’re doing it in part by glossing over the sins and excesses of the super-rich (individuals and corporations) by euphemistically referring to them as “job creators.”

There have been times in America where the broad public rose up in protest against the sins, excesses and abuses of the rich and of big business. Today’s “job creators” are yesterday’s “robber barons.” The Tea Party protests of 2009 were the beginning of the opposite trend; Americans rising up in protest on behalf of, and in support of, the sins, excesses and abuses of the rich and of big business.

War is Peace, and all that. Doublethink, in its purest form.

The Party of Hoover: Save the Banks, Fuck the People.