The Redistribution of Wealth...

...or, just how many millions of dollars are you worth?

Halloween is just around the corner.  This year's scariest costume is going to be Bernie Sanders, the socialist.  I just saw Michael Steele, that faux intellectual, on C-Span interviewing another conservative, i.e. wealthy, republican.  The inevitable question came up about "redistribution of wealth."  The answer being, if they are going to take all my money and give it away, I will no longer have the incentive to work to make that money.

Yeah, well, we've been hearing versions of that tune for a long time now.  It comes as the "job creator" myth, wherein if you let rich people keep their money they will grow their businesses and hire more people.  Also known as the "trickle down" theory of the Reagan years.  Turns out, it only trickles down when the rich folk pee all over us.

It seems odd to me that the middle class has had to work harder for less, but we continue to work hard.  More jobs, fewer benefits, worse health, less mobility.  Kids who can't afford to go to college.  Elderly who would eat cat food, but it's as expensive as tuna.  Working poor who have to turn to food stamps, who have to go to work sick and leave their kids home alone or get fired.  But we keep working.

And yet the Koch brothers, should they be required to pay a smidge more of their wealth to the government so that the middle class and the poor can breathe a little easier, well, they just might get discouraged and throw in the towel.  Take their marbles and go home is more like it.

The wordsmiths of the right wing have been all over this, telling lies and calling the fight for income equality "class warfare," the estate or inheritance tax renamed "death tax," turning "socialism" into a bogeyman.  If we want to see a Democrat in the White House after 2016, we need to understand the reality of income inequality and the bizarre wealth gap that exists in America.

Robert Reich, economist and sketch artist extraordinaire has a number of simple and eloquent youtube videos that tell the story.  Jon Oliver has had a few entertaining and informative segments that illustrate, for example, how we have all been led to believe the "death tax" should be abolished even though 1) it does not affect 99.86 percent of us, 2) you don't pay a penny under 5.3 million dollars and 3) the people who would pay the tax actually didn't earn it.

Here's the thing about this redistribution of wealth nonsense.  The rich pay a lower percentage of taxes than the poor and middle class.  They are able to hide wealth in tax shelters and have loopholes designed expressly in which to hide their wealth.  It is a gross falsehood that the poor do not pay taxes.  Here in South Carolina, food is taxed.  The inequities that persist in auto taxes in SC were documented in February in the Post and Courier:  the sales tax bill, regardless of the value of a vehicle cannot exceed $300, and then cars are assessed an annual property tax.  Each year I pay over $30 on my 2003 Mitsubishi, 180,000+ miles and counting.  Because legislators refuse to increase property taxes on the wealthy and stop giving away the store to corporations, we are forced to keep voting to raise the regressive sales tax to pay for needed improvements to our schools and libraries.

Our politicians have been schooled well in nurturing our ignorance and giving us a false sense that they are protecting our interests.  That is why we continue to elect those who promise to cut taxes and reduce government.  We see how government doesn't work, because the combination of giveaways to corporations and reduction in services becomes the self-fulfilling prophecy of bad government.

When opponents wake up to Bernie Sanders, and they will, socialism will come front and center as the dirty word of the 2016 campaign, and along with it the threat that the government is going to take the wealth away from all those hard-working job creators.  Don't let them get away with this nonsense.  Paying people a living wage, making sure that our children are well fed and educated, bringing our infrastructure, from electrical grids to the internet, into the 21st century, that is the job that government should be doing, and those who have gotten rich from our hard work should help finance it.

So this Halloween, when someone jumps out from behind the shrubbery and yells, "redistribution of wealth!" I plan on saying, "Oh, thank gods, I was afraid you were Donald Trump."

Democrats Reframe!

I don't get why the voters don't get that the rich need to pay more taxes.  And that the wealthy shouldn't get to pass on their wealth to kids that haven't earned it.

I believe it really must speak to our indoctrination of what we believe America should be.  The land of the free means we get to keep what we got, which is why the charge of "socialism" is so heinous.

We can't seem to fight back by pointing out that people are dying from lack of or inadequate health care, or that people have lost their homes because they lost their jobs because corporations are buying cheap labor in third world countries.

Morality doesn't seem to have anything to do with this fight.

Whenever the republic party senses that they are losing a battle, they immediately sic their promotional/advertising powerhouses on the problem.  They have lots of them, and they are highly motivated to solve this problem, because the problem has everything to do with power and money, and this is what they do, and, as Mike Steele would say, how they roll.

We are always, always caught running behind in these fights.  Take the abortion battle.  We had to come up with pro-choice after the anti-abortionists framed the battle as being "pro-life" (which made us "anti-life").  Pro-choice just doesn't compare dynamically with pro-life.

And then there was the estate tax, which brought to mind, well, estates.  So it became the "death tax", which brings to mind images of the grim reaper taking your life savings along with your last breath.  And we haven't come up with a better way to advertise the estate tax.  If you talk to plain old ordinary people, i.e. voters, about this tax, they will probably refer to it as the "death tax", because it's just simpler than the phrase "estate tax".  We are all familiar with death, less so with estates.

So we have voters who are terrified of the national debt, and more terrified of taxation.  At this point, I don't think the republic party has come up with a catchy phrase for their side.  They are just repeating ad nauseum the threat that if taxed, the wealthy won't be able to give us jobs.  It is lame, and it doesn't have a catchy ring to it.

Now is the time to get our best and our brightest to work on this problem.  Ex republicans like David Brock and Arianna Huffington would be able to grasp the problem in an instant.  We need some private meetings in some smoke-free rooms.  And then we need to spread the word, the word being the bright new liberal catch-phrase for taxing the wealthy.  We need to make sure that everyone from Harry Reid to Keith Olbermann to Stephen Colbert to Ben Bernanke to Oprah has that phrase on their lips.  We need to make it a household word.

Because what we should have learned by now, is that it is not about the issue, it is about the packaging.