Views » October 24, 2008 » Web Only

McCain Banking on a Confederacy of Dunces

By David Sirota

Is John McCain stupid, or does he believe we are? That’s the question as he criticizes Barack Obama for allegedly trying to “redistribute the wealth” with a plan to lower taxes on the middle class and raise them on the super-rich.

Of course, the Democrat’s proposal would merely slow down (not fully halt) the less-talked-about redistribution whereby Washington sends middle-class money up the income ladder. Either McCain doesn’t know about this kleptocracy and is the dumbest presidential candidate in history, or he thinks America is too ignorant to recognize theft. Which is it?

I’m guessing the latter, since the evidence is so overwhelming.

In the last eight years, we the little people have been forced to provide more and more of the taxes fueling America’s redistribution machine. As the Congressional Budget Office reports, the $715 billion in tax breaks that President Bush gave to those making more than $342,000 a year began dramatically shifting the overall tax burden from the rich onto the rest of us. Meanwhile, because of lobbyist-crafted loopholes, most corporations pay zero federal income taxes, according to the Government Accountability Office. The result is what Warren Buffett admits: When counting all taxes (income, payroll, property, etc.), billionaires and Big Business often pay lower effective tax rates than their employees.

The output of the redistribution machine is becoming just as regressive. In the age of Halliburton fraud and ExxonMobil subsidies, our government spends $93 billion a year on corporate welfare. (For comparison, that’s roughly three times what it spends on a traditional welfare program like food stamps.) That doesn’t include the recent bailout giving $700 billion to the same banks currently doling out $70 billion in executive pay and bonuses — a scheme the Financial Times says “amounts to a large transfer of resources from lower to higher income earners.”

Thanks to these redistributive policies — policies McCain championed in Congress — the richest 1 percent today owns a larger share of America’s wealth than at any time since before the Great Depression.

The Republican standard-bearer likely knows all this, but his fetish is fact-free fairy tales — the kind presenting seven houses, a beer-industry fortune and lockstep conservatism as mavericky Joe-the-Plumber populism. When it comes to economics, McCain is banking on Americans believing similarly inane myths — specifically, those portraying obscene affluence as the commonplace achievement under royalist rule.

During the indigence and socioeconomic immobility of the 19th century’s Gilded Age, this meme flourished through Horatio Alger stories. Today, one in five American children live in poverty, and authorities from The Economist magazine to The Wall Street Journal note that our country exhibits the least amount of upward economic mobility in the industrialized world — less than even Europe’s supposedly sclerotic socialisms. In light of that, sustaining the “American Dream” narrative requires updated rags-to-riches fantasies like “MTV Cribs,” HBO’s “Entourage” — and now McCain ‘08.

The Arizona senator’s pulp fiction packs an extra-nationalistic punch, however. We are not only expected to support regressive redistribution, but also to believe that stopping such robbery is subversive. McCain implies Obama is backing Soviet conquest by proposing to finance tax cuts for 95 percent of American workers with tax increases on the richest 5 percent. When Joe Biden said it is “patriotic” for millionaires to pay their fair share of taxes, Republicans waved the bloody shirt of Reaganism and attacked him — as if Al Capone-style tax evasion is how aristocrats display their true love of country.

The GOP campaign, in short, is a brew of redbaiting and free-market zealotry, a concoction with a poisonous purpose: resurrecting the everyone-for-themselves pathologies that perpetuate the status quo. And if we revert to selfish form during this economic crisis, then McCain’s cynical calculation is correct: America is a confederacy of dunces.

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• Reader Comments

  To David Sirota,

  Yes, MCCain has been running a dumb campaign.

  Obama, on the other hand is running a smart one.

  Unfortunately, one of them will be the next President of the United States, not because of what he will do, but because of the campaign promises and avoidance of revealing the either real person.

  Both appear to be so entrawled with the idea of becoming president that they are willing to say (or is not to say more accurate?) whatever it takes to fit the image their handlers think will win the “game.”

  McCain’s pasted-on smile and attempt to hide any possible angry feelings is a far cry from the candidate who ran before and would have gotten my vote.

  Obama’s parsing and pandering will probably carry the day. (I voted for him once, but never again.) What is the price taxpayers will pay for his vote purchases?

  Neither candidate had the guts or the wisdom to criticize the stupid top-end bailout “solution” being foisted on taxpayers by Paulson and Bernanke.

  When you were on CNBC Thursday both you and Bill Seidman ( the kind of guy who should be in charge of this crisis repair) expressed what many of us feel — total distrust for the entire financial system and government in general. Especially of those two expletives (Ben & Hank) I would so like to delete from the process.

  People don’t need another hand-out, they need a hand up. Unless something is done to create millions of jobs (think massive infrastructure project) we are very possibly going to bypass the R word and go directly to Depression.

  BTW:

  We been stuck with the “official” two down quarters label for recession — what would it take to honestly call it a depression?

  Perhaps corpses at the curb each morning?

  Posted by whattheheck on Oct 24, 2008 at 4:05 PM

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