Spreading the Wealth Around
I think it’s totally fair of John McCain to criticize Barack Obama for wanting to spread the wealth around. Indeed, though the “Joe the Plumber” debate hasn’t been the most substantive thing in the world, it’s in the neighborhood of some real issues. Recently, the wealth has gotten more and more concentrated in the hands of the very wealthiest individuals. Many people think it would be a good idea to try to change that and create more broadly shared prosperity. McCain, evidently, disagrees. It’s a good argument to have.
I’ve been puzzled, however, by the willingness of some in the press to refer to Obama’s statement as a “gaffe” as if rather than a contested issue in the political debate this was some kind of no-brainer where most Americans take a strongly pro-inequality view. The data suggest otherwise:
What you see here is that traditionally a large majority of Americans have favored spreading the wealth around. By harping on this point, McCain seems to have succeeded in making his position less unpopular presumably by “educating” Republican partisans that the pro-inequality view is the “right” one. At the same time, he’s succeeded in increasing the salience of a topic on which he draws the short end of a 37-58 split. My sense is that this is traditionally a topic on which conservative politicians have tried — successfully — to remain ambiguous, drawing votes from both a pro-inequality base and also a large egalitarian-minded swing bloc.
43 Responses to “Spreading the Wealth Around”
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October 31st, 2008 at 10:54 am
The question is phrased a little strangely in that Gallup poll. It leaves out the third possibility that money in this country is too evenly distributed. That has implicitly been the view of the Republican establishment for a long time (or at least large chunks, witness proponents of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, many of the various national sales tax or flat tax proposals, etc.).
October 31st, 2008 at 10:54 am
That’s why the McCain camp immediately jumped into hyperbole about socialism. The only way to sell that any kind of pushback against the changes in tax distribution during the Bush years is somehow radical and un-American is by branding it as obviously un-American.
I’d love for a prominent Obama supporter to remind people just how far right we’ve pushed tax policy over the last 40 or 50 years, and that Obama returning to a more Clinton-like code is still very, very far from socialism. The top marginal tax rate in 1963 was 91 percent! And yet 35 or 40 percent makes Obama a socialist, somehow? Nonsense.
October 31st, 2008 at 10:59 am
If Obama wasn’t black, this wouldn’t have the resonance it is having.
October 31st, 2008 at 11:00 am
It is reminiscent of when Newt Gingrich became so deranged he began arguing against the environment rather than for business-friendly regulations. Although in McCain’s case, there is actually a chance that Republicans do object more to equality than to the means by which it might be attained.
October 31st, 2008 at 11:07 am
You seem to suggest that McCain is trying to have a debate on the merits. He’s not. He’s trying to suggest that Obama’s plan is to take money from those who’ve earned it, and hand it over to those who have not. If some of the latter happen to be black, well, that’s like a bonus in Obama’s world.
The disgrace here is, without doubt, the fact that just about nobody in the media has called him on his bullshit.
October 31st, 2008 at 11:09 am
You gotta love Bush…the man’s tenure abounds in extremes. Most dissatisfaction with inequality? Check. Least dissatisfaction with inequality? Check!!
OK, not quite the least but close enough. However, I think Matt explains this well. During election time, people suddenly start mouthing the talking points of their side. Presumably Bush I and Dole didn’t make “inequality-great-redistribution-bad” their mantra hence the data tracked with actual economic fundamentals.
October 31st, 2008 at 11:09 am
Why are you puzzled? Anything that can remotely be spun is socialism is wrong in the minds of the media…
October 31st, 2008 at 11:11 am
Biden’s statement that the next president will be tested wasn’t a “gaffe” either. The press reported it as such because the McCain campaign said it was.
October 31st, 2008 at 11:14 am
Ooh, that’s a great point…further explains the steep change in such a short time. At least, the change at the end of the Clinton era partly tracks the economic euphoria of ‘98-99. This time round re-distribution has probably taken a different connotation for a segment of the population.
October 31st, 2008 at 11:17 am
It isn’t what Obama said, but THE WAY he said it. If he’d said, “We need to create opportunities for the middle class keep more of their income,” or something to that effect, the charge wouldn’t stick. “Spread the wealth” is a formulation that lends itself to being interpreted (by GOP spin) as taking from one class and giving to another. Americans like to hear how they can “earn” more, not “give” more to those nasty folks on welfare, etc.
October 31st, 2008 at 11:23 am
What’s with the 10% increase in “distribution is fair” in the last year even as inequality has increased? Shouldn’t now, at the end of the last expansion, when we discovered that lo, none of the wealth created at the top of the distribution will ever trickled down be the time when we really get pissed about inequality? Weird.
October 31st, 2008 at 11:26 am
Obama is merely suggesting giving me a tax cut.
So someone explain to me how allowing me to keep more of my money in my pocket is socialism.
October 31st, 2008 at 11:26 am
The other idiotic aspect of this whole episode is that “spreading the wealth” is an innocuous, proverbial phrase that we all find completely freakin’ normal. Which is why McCain and Palin have been trying hard to say that Obama wants to spread _your_ wealth around, as opposed to _the_ wealth. Rhetorically, you might stand to get a piece of _the_ wealth. You always lose if it’s _your_ wealth. And that’s without even mentioning how stupid it is to be attempting to conduct this debate when people _have_ no goddamn wealth in the first damn place.
I agree with Matt’s assertion that that only reason this has worked at all is that Republicans have gone out of their way to establish that if you’re a Republican, clearly what you believe is that “spreading the wealth” is A Bad Thing. Even when, as a neutral proposition, without knowing what The Other Side would like, you’d almost certainly say that it isn’t. Conservatives are supposed to think that liberals are selfish and materialistic, right? What happened to that?
October 31st, 2008 at 11:28 am
This is why it’s confounded me that Obama hasn’t hit back with one of those easy-to-read bar graphs showing how wealth has been redistributed UPWARD for the past eight years (25 years, 30 years…), AND WILL CONTINUE TO BE under McCain’s plan.
Calling Obama a socialist is laughable, and the stump comebacks about toys and PB&J are funny enough, but this is actually a serious issue. Free-market capitalism has kinda shown its ass lately, no? And as I’ve suspected, and this demonstrates, calling someone a “socialist” is like calling them an “atheist” (or a “Muslim”); it resonates without people really knowing what it means.
The next administration and our society as a whole, if we’re responsible, are going to have to experiment with some new economic and social ideas. John McCain doesn’t even believe what he’s saying, but he’s retooled the word and plated it with chrome, and I can already hear Capitol Hill Republicans baying “Socialism!” to the skies, repeatedly, for the next 20 years. The issue is eventually going to have to be taken head-on. We’ll never fix health care, for openers, if we don’t.
October 31st, 2008 at 11:28 am
It was a gaffe, as least in campaign terms. It was a vague statement, and many people would have reacted at least somewhat the way they did even without the hyperbole provided by the McCain campaign. Obama should have been more specific, as he has in most other cases, that he wanted to use progressive taxes to ensure that the rich would pay a fairer share of the burden. That’s something my middle-class Dad can get on board with. However, after 40 years of hard work and saving, he is not interested in “spreading his wealth around”, and as he told me yesterday, is still wavering precisely because of his fear about what an Obama presidency might mean for him financially. Those are the voters to whom McCain is pandering.
October 31st, 2008 at 11:30 am
At a rally yesterday McCain called JoetheP up on stage, but apparantley he wasn’t at the rally. So McCain, after fumbling a bit, then said something like, “Oh well. You are all Joe the Plumbers!” And the crowd cheered. A more pathetic moment i do not know.
Can you imagine if Barack, talking about the economic plight of average Americans, proclaimed, “You are all Tyrone the garbagemen!”
It’s just so painfully dumb. Oy!!
October 31st, 2008 at 11:34 am
I disagree — he said it fine. “Joe” was framing his whole question in terms of how it wouldn’t be fair for him to have to pay more taxes just because he was — or his future self might be — making more than $250K. So he got a gentle version of the same lecture every kid gets when he learns the concept of “Mine!”: that sharing and cooperation are virtues.
“Spread the wealth” has never been a damning phrase before, or a shibboleth for radicals. It’s not like Obama started talking about the proletariat.
October 31st, 2008 at 11:39 am
See, this is what I mean. The crucial word is “his.” Obama didn’t say “his” (or, I guess, “your”). That’s been imported into the context in a colossal act of bad faith.
October 31st, 2008 at 11:41 am
As Ban Johnson (#2) points out, the US was far more “socialist” in the good ole days of Cold War. And JFK actually cut taxes; the Eisenhower administration was even more “socialist”. Check this out for the history of tax rates facing people with comfortably high (but not filthy-rich-high) incomes. It might surprise you that rates higher than 50% for high earners were once considered quite normal.
October 31st, 2008 at 11:43 am
My impression is that very many people misunderstand the idea of _marginal_ rates and instead internalize a feeling that “Whatever it is, it’s too much.”
October 31st, 2008 at 11:46 am
“Spreading your wealth around” and “redistribution” are just two examples of unnecessary statements that feed the GOP and don’t further your cause. It reminds me of the “have you seen the price of arugula at Whole Foods” comment in the primaries. Unless Obama actually is advocating taking money from the rich and giving it directly to the poor then there are many ways he could say redistribution without saying redistribution. He could talk about many of the programs which will make America’s middle class more competitive and more wealthy. He could talk about schools or health care. Even though these are all forms of redistribution they are politically untouchable.
But bringing up redistribution makes people think of welfare dependency and genuine problems associated with misguided liberal policy.
October 31st, 2008 at 11:47 am
Flipyrwhig – yep, yep, I agree with you completely. But in campaigns such as this, candidates have to be hypervigilant about not providing opportunities where their words and ideas can be distorted by opponents, the media, or the general populace. Obama, in my opinion, has done a great job of avoiding it, but in this case, it was a gaffe, especially if he is trying to attract conservative-leaning undecideds. And I don’t think it is just bad faith that gets people to misconstrue this. Many people don’t need the bad faith promptings of the McCain campaign to be put off by this sort of statement. I heard it and I winced, b/c I knew exactly what my conservative-leaning friends and family would hear (i.e. not ‘the’ wealth, but ‘their’ wealth).
October 31st, 2008 at 11:51 am
MY, you are actually getting at what is most egregious about McCain’s demagoguing on “spreading the wealth around”: McCain isn’t really against it himself. To run on such a talking point, and not be a bald-faced liar, McCain would have to be advocating (at the very least) a flat tax, with few or no personal or family exemptions.
October 31st, 2008 at 11:58 am
Did he, in fact, say “redistribution”? Maybe in that interview from when he was a law professor. But I don’t remember it during this campaign. “Spread the wealth” IMHO is a fine colloquial way to discuss the topic, if perhaps marginally less anodyne than phrases like “level playing field” and “fair share.” But what’s happening here is equivalent to hearing Obama say he wants to level the playing field and pretending that means he’s calling out a fleet of bulldozers to flatten your hard-earned property. I guess the Republicans deserve some credit for their ability to deflect and distort such a remark, but that doesn’t make it a gaffe.
Actually, it’s kind of similar to taking Gore’s line about “creating the Internet,” twisting it into “inventing the Internet,” and then starting to quote “inventing.”
October 31st, 2008 at 12:01 pm
Thx, Susan. It surprises me to hear that, though, because in my experience “spread the wealth” is conversationally interchangeable with requests not to “bogart,” um, things.
October 31st, 2008 at 12:10 pm
The image of Obama saying to Joe the Plumber “Don’t bogart that wealth, my friend…” What would the McCain campaign have done with that one????
October 31st, 2008 at 1:39 pm
What I find really interesting about this discussion is a false dichotomy (spelling?) created by the McCain campaign between “spreading the wealth” and “creating wealth”. Thing is you have to do both, without growth you can’t redistribute, at least in a market economy, which is a topic out of the question.
On the other hand, if a tax system exist redistribution is taking place, both progressive and regressive. Sales taxes are regressive, whereas income taxes are progressive. So, I can’t understand all the turmoil around this false controversy. Actually, almost all public expenditures are redistributive in its essence, no matter how much a politician tries to disguise it or say otherwise.
My 2 cts…
Greetings from Argentina
Caterina
October 31st, 2008 at 1:45 pm
Awe. Some.
October 31st, 2008 at 3:09 pm
The image of Obama saying to Joe the Plumber “Don’t bogart that wealth, my friend…” What would the McCain campaign have done with that one????
McCain would say, “That’s not fair, I had no weed for five and a half years…”
October 31st, 2008 at 3:31 pm
I think the basic problem here is that people see issues as different when presented in different frameworks. The GOP has done a decent job of painting a picture where “spreading the wealth” is part of a framework of socialist ideas that we were taught to hate as kids in school, whereas we haven’t done nearly enough to paint sharing the wealth as what it actually is, closing the inequality gap (which is popular).
A good analogy is gay marriage: we had a lot of trouble defending it as long as the GOP dominated the discussion about it and painted it in religious terms. It wasn’t until liberals were able to make our case (publicly and repeatedly) that gay marriage should be viewed in terms of civil rights that people started to catch on.
October 31st, 2008 at 3:52 pm
It looks to me like 91-95% of the people favor wealth redistribution. We get the distribution we have with a progressive income tax, so if you think it is fair, you’re a wicked redistributionist. I guess only about 5% agree with John McCain and think that there is too much redistribution, and not even all of those think there should be no redistribution.
October 31st, 2008 at 4:08 pm
The UN recently pointed out that the U.S. is one of the least equal countries in the industrialized world. Some of our cities on an equality par (measuring by the Gini Coefficient) with African cities. New York is one of the least equal places in the entire world.
Also, what’s funny is that a super conservative friend of mine had a run of bad luck and is now using Medicaid to have a child. Her former position was “welfare is just paying black to people to have more babies.” It’s funny how useful “socialism” is when it’s your ass in the chair.
November 1st, 2008 at 8:19 pm
allowing me to keep more of my money in my pocket is socialism.
The fact that you are “allowed” (read: permitted) by the government to keep it — as opposed to keeping it by right — is socialism.
Are you next going to ask how being given a bigger cell is still imprisonmnent?
That you are OK with being “allowed” your own money speaks volumes.
November 1st, 2008 at 9:12 pm
The question, as indicated by others is sort of awkward. If I was asked the question, I would probably want wealth to be distributed more equally too. I think some CEOs are scumbags and overpaid, even in failure.
BUT, and this is a big but, if you were to ask me, “Do you think the federal government should tax more successful people in order to redistribute their wealth to less successful people”, I would say HELL NO. And you would find most Americans do too. When you work hard for an A in school, is it right for the teacher or professor to give everyone a C instead in order to “spread the grades around”.
This is not to mention the fact that we don’t live in a democracy, even though public school teachers have convinced our children that we are. What?!? you say. Of course it’s a democracy!
No, it’s a republic. Democracy is two wolves and a sheep fighting over what’s for dinner. In a republic, the sheep has individual rights. And guns. While I realize Obama’s base of uneducated African Americans and non-working college students are the people who believe they have the right to the fruits of other people’s labor, that doesn’t make it so.
And for the record, the US has the second highest corporate tax rate in the WORLD. So the notion that business doesn’t pay enough taxes here is nonsense, and merely confirms the suspicions of people who think Obama is in his heart, a Socialist.
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