If you were watching the third Presidential debate, you may have noticed that John McCain had hit on a new line of attack: Barack Obama wants to “redistribute wealth.” To those of us who interpret phrases by attaching meanings to the individual words within them, this comes off as pretty weak sauce. Of course Barack Obama wants the government to redistribute wealth; so does John McCain. That’s one of the things that government does. Every time the government takes money in the form of taxes or fees, or spends money on social services or public works or anything else at all, it redistributes wealth. Most obviously, we have a progressive tax system: people with higher incomes (supposedly) pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes. This is nothing new, and no mainstream candidate for national office proposes to do away with it.
Admittedly, as a country we are not very good at redistributing wealth. The gap between rich and poor in the U.S. is larger than in any other developed country. And progressive taxation isn’t nearly what it appears at first blush:
Even in the United States, the rich pay a disproportionate share of the federal income tax, which mildly reduces inequality. Other taxes, however, like Social Security, are regressive: the rich pay a lesser share. Thus, the upper tenth of households pay 70 percent of the income tax, but only 52 percent of all federal taxes. State sales taxes make the system even more regressive, because poorer people spend a higher share of their total income on them. Kevin Hassett, of the American Enterprise Institute, estimates that a family of four earning $50,000 pays exactly the same share of its income (30 percent) on taxes as one earning $150,000.
There’s little question that Obama’s policies would be slightly more redistributive than the status quo. Most obviously, he wants to raise taxes on the upper few percent of earners, and cut taxes to the middle class; he also proposes to expand health care coverage quite a bit. These are concrete policy proposals that are squarely in the mainstream of popular debate — his health care proposal was notably less ambitious than those of Hillary Clinton or John Edwards — but are certainly arguable; a freeze on health-care spending and a giant tax cut for the wealthiest Americans is also squarely within the mainstream of popular debate. Here is the graph of the impact that Obama’s and McCain’s tax proposals would have on different income groups:
Obama’s plan would hit the upper 1%, who benefited the most from Bush’s tax cuts, and it would lighten the burden on the lower 80%; McCain’s help is targeted at the top 20%, and (by virtue of not raising taxes on anyone) would cost an extra trillion dollars over ten years. Given what passes for a mainstream consensus in contemporary U.S. politics, the choice between these two options is considered to be a close one. So there is nothing crazy or desperate about criticizing Obama’s proposals on the merits.
But McCain and his supporters aren’t fretting over graphs of the growth of American inequality, or even over the distribution of tax rates. They are fretting over this, the histogram of likely electoral-college outcomes from fivethirtyeight.com:
As a response to this stark reality, they have decided to seize upon “redistribute wealth” not in terms of the actual meaning of its actual words, but as a slogan of SECRET SOCIALISM. For whatever reasons — this is a matter for future psychohistorians, not for humble physicist/bloggers — a substantial segment of right-wing punditry refuses to believe that Barack Obama is what he says he is, or what he has actually acted like his entire adult life: a thoughtful center-left politician. They have no doubt that he is the most radical figure ever to come this close to the Presidency.
Obama’s entire campaign is built on class warfare and human envy. The “change” he peddles is not new. We’ve seen it before. It is change that diminishes individual liberty for the soft authoritarianism of socialism… Unlike past Democrat presidential candidates, Obama is a hardened ideologue. He’s not interested in playing around the edges. He seeks “fundamental change,” i.e., to remake society.
To these folks, “redistribute wealth” isn’t a straightforward description of how the government operates under the present system. Rather, it’s a slip of the tongue, revealing the dictatorship-of-the-proletariat leanings hidden behind the nonthreatening exterior. And here is the revealing moment to which McCain was referring in that debate, when Obama explains to Joe the Plumber how his plans will remake Amerikkka as a socialist utopia:
Whew. Scary. This sort of wild-eyed communism is just what leads to endorsements from the Financial Times.
Which is why McCain’s allies are crowing with glee over the discovery of a 2001 radio interview with Obama, in which he again uses the phrase “redistributive change,” which is not precisely the same but close enough. Here is the kind of reaction this dramatic finding is receiving:
We have, in our storied history, elected Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives and moderates. We have fought, and will continue to fight, pitched battles about how best to govern this nation. But we have never, ever in our 232-year history, elected a president who so completely and openly opposed the idea of limited government, the absolute cornerstone of makes the United States of America unique and exceptional.
If this does not frighten you — regardless of your political affiliation — then you deserve what this man will deliver with both houses of Congress, a filibuster-proof Senate, and, to quote Senator Obama again, “a righteous wind at our backs.”
That a man so clear in his understanding of the Constitution, and so opposed to the basic tenets it provides against tyranny and the abuse of power, can run for president of the United States is shameful enough.
We’re just getting started.
You can listen to the entire interview here, in RealPlayer. As an Obama supporter, all I can say is: please listen. (The interview was conducted on the late, lamented WBEZ program Odyssey, hosted by the redoubtable Gretchen Helfrich. Other Obama appearances here.) The response of any non-crazy person to that interview would be “Hmm, he sounds like a thoughtful guy. It sure would be nice to have someone as President who understood some of the nuances of separation of powers and the role of the Supreme Court in the federal government.”
Because that’s all the interview is about. Obama is talking about the role of the Warren Court in the civil rights movement. He makes a simple and true point, one that conservatives should love to hear: policy-making should not be done through the courts. The Warren Court, he says, was not very radical, even if it was painted as such at the time; it was essentially reactive, and that’s always going to be a feature of the appellate court system. If you actually want to enact substantive changes that have a chance of sticking, the right mechanism is political action and the passage of legislation, not relying on the courts to fix things.
You know, I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. The institution just isn’t structured that way. [snip] You start getting into all sorts of separation of powers issues, you know, in terms of the court monitoring or engaging in a process that essentially is administrative and takes a lot of time. You know, the court is just not very good at it, and politically, it’s just very hard to legitimize opinions from the court in that regard.
Communist! Oh wait, sorry, that didn’t seem very communist at all. The above quote is in response to a question from a caller, who wants to know whether the Court is “the appropriate place for reparative economic work to change place.” And Obama’s response is: no. Hardly very dramatic, really. As David Berstein at the Volokh Conspiracy, usually a reliably conservative voice, puts it:
The whole interview is worth listening to for another reason: Obama gives a very impressive performance as a constitutional scholar. Even though he was holding down other jobs while teaching at Chicago, he clearly had thought a lot about constitutional history, and how social change is or is not brought about through the courts…
What I don’t understand is why this is surprising, or interesting enough to be headlining Drudge [UPDATE: Beyond the fact that Drudge's headline suggests, wrongly, that Obama states that the Supreme Court should have ordered the redistribution of income; as Orin says, his views on the subject, beyond that it was an error to promote this agenda in historical context, are unclear.]. At least since the passage of the first peacetime federal income tax law about 120 years ago, redistribution of wealth has been a (maybe the) primary item on the left populist/progressive/liberal agenda, and has been implicitly accepted to some extent by all but the most libertarian Republicans as well. Barack Obama is undoubtedly liberal, and his background is in political community organizing in poor communities. Is it supposed to be a great revelation that Obama would like to see wealth more “fairly” distributed than it is currently?
It’s true that most Americans, when asked by pollsters, think that it’s emphatically not the government’s job to redistribute wealth. But are people so stupid as to not recognize that when politicians talk about a “right to health care,” or “equalizing educational opportunities,” or “making the rich pay a fair share of taxes,” or “ensuring that all Americans have the means to go to college,” and so forth and so on, that they are advocating the redistribution of wealth? Is it okay for a politician to talk about the redistribution of wealth only so long as you don’t actually use phrases such as “redistribution” or “spreading the wealth,” in which case he suddenly becomes “socialist”? If so, then American political discourse, which I never thought to be especially elevated, is in even a worse state than I thought.
It is in a worse state, Prof. Bernstein! You have every right to be concerned about that. The generous reading of the spectacle of right-wing pundits leaping on the word “redistribute” is that it serves as a litmus test — to most people, it’s straightforwardly descriptive, but to a certain segment of the punditocracy that has long been convinced that Obama is a closet radical, it’s a rare glimpse at the socialist core of this man’s being. The less-generous reading (depending on one’s preferred mode of generosity) is that they know exactly what they are doing, and they understand perfectly well that Obama is not any more socialist than any other mainstream Democrat, but they are desperate to sling poop around and hope that something sticks, because the electoral college prognostications are not good.
If those prognostications hold true, and Obama wins on November 4, the conservative movement is going to have to do some serious soul-searching. Do they want to engage politically with the other side and discuss different policy options on the merits, or do they prefer the screeching-monkey approach? Do thoughtful economic free-marketers want to continue to tie their hopes for success at the ballot box to goggle-eyed know-nothing social conservatives, or do they want to try to construct a winning coalition among intellectually respectable lines? Politics is cyclical, and there is no question that conservatives will bounce back. But it’s not clear how quickly it will happen, or what form the resurgence will take; that’s up to them.
October 27th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
I agree with your numbers, but not all of your conclusions. Some conservatives (and this is probably a very small minority) aren’t just attacking the idea of “income redistribution”, but the repeated claim that Sen. Obama will lower the income taxes on 95% of Americans. Given that a significant percentage of Americans do not pay any income taxes at all, this figure sounds dubious until you realize that the tax credits he is proposing would create a negative tax burden on the lower income tax paying population – in other words, it would result in “refunds” when there was no money payed in to refund. This, in essence, is the “income redistribution” that these conservatives are criticizing, not the normal sense that federal and state income taxes are used to fund government services, but that higher tax rates on the upper percentages of wage earners would be directly redistributed in the form of cash. This could be seen as a form of welfare to some extent or as a heavy-handed attempt to balance income disparities – hence the accusations of socialism and communism.
October 27th, 2008 at 1:17 pm
A 10% reduction in income for the top 0.1% and an 8.5% reduction for the top 1%? I’m not in either category and I probably don’t know anybody who makes that much money, but even I can see that’s a bit unjust. No one should see his or her after-tax income drop by 10% just because of a new tax plan. I supported Obama before, but now I’m a little doubtful…
October 27th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
cmpalmer– The people making those accusations should look up “socialism” and “communism” in a dictionary.
joe– People in the top 0.1% of earners are those who make over $2,832,449 per year. They were the primary beneficiaries of the Bush tax cuts. Restoring their tax burden to Clintonian levels is not tantamount to socialism.
October 27th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
Redistribution of wealth you say? That sounds very much like a catchphrase summary of this passage:
“Servants, labourers, and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerably well fed, cloathed and lodged.”
That statement was written by that paragon of Marxist thought, Adam Smith
October 27th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
When we talk about the ‘right to healthcare’ I’m not sure that anyone knows what we are talking about.
If we did, then these tactics wouldn’t work.
I suggest that instead of promising healthcare or college or educational opportunities (these are things no politician can actually deliver) they should run on the more honest- I will take money from people and give that money to other people.
Then we could have a better informed voting public.
October 27th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
Also re: the “tax credits he is proposing would create a negative tax burden”:
The most famous proponent of a negative income tax in the 20th century (who many in the US incorrectly take to have been it’s original architect) was the communist Milton Friedman in the 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom and also famously in the 1969 testimony before Congress. This is not to say that Friedman would’ve supported Obama; just to say that the idea that a negative income tax is socialist or communist is wrong.
October 27th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
It has to be repeated over and over again that even people who don’t pay income tax are supporting the federal government with taxes. Social Security runs a surplus. All the money from payroll taxes that doesn’t go out as benefits goes directly into the general treasury. Absent those contributions, spending would have to be less or deficits and/or taxes would have to be greater. Payroll taxes are a major reason why the American tax system is not very progressive overall.
Lessening inequality is imperative for at least two reasons, one economic, one political.
1. Inequality produces financial bubbles and depressions because the effective demand for products and services is not sufficient to provide opportunities for meaningful investments when the people who do the work don’t benefit from increases in productivity. You can only build so many yachts, so the rich bid up the prices of real estate and financial instruments in an attempt to find a profitable place to put their money. In the not very long run, these paper gains are unsupportable. We’re seeing what happens when the house of cards falls over. Capitalism absolutely requires redistribution to persist. In its absence, the most likely outcome is not laissez faire but some sort of authoritarian system where government spending on social control and the military supports an economy that would otherwise fail from lack of effective demand, in other words, modern China or ancient Byzantium.
2. Huge inequalities of wealth are dangerous to any republican form of government because disproportionate political power goes along with off-the-chart wealth accumulation. That’s why Theodore Roosevelt introduced estate taxes– you don’t have to be very left to object to the creation of a hereditary aristocracy.
The best arguments for the progressive income tax and other public policies that promote relative equality aren’t Marxist; they’re Keynesian and Madisonian.
October 27th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
“Kevin Hassett, of the American Enterprise Institute, estimates that a family of four earning $50,000 pays exactly the same share of its income (30 percent) on taxes as one earning $150,000.”
At least as far as federal taxes go, I have found very illuminating the reports published by the Congressional Budget Office (see http://www.cbo.gov and search for tax reports, e.g.
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/88xx/doc8885/EffectiveTaxRates.shtml ).
Among the things you learn are, federal taxes really are progressive. However, the average tax on the very wealthy is really not much larger than the average tax on the upper middle class. For example, it takes a little work and guesswork to compare taxes paid by a typical $150k household to a typical $1M+ household, but I have played these games and find the respective rates ~ 21% and 31%. My *opinion*, having played with these numbers, is there is much to gain in terms of fairness with introducing additional tax brackets at the top, or taxing capital gains as income, etc. One surprising result: if you imagine a “flat tax” with a sizable “standard deduction” (i.e. >~ $15k), then you really have to make in excess of ~$250k or so in order to benefit! Perhaps few upper-middle-class Republicans in support of such a tax realize this.
Incidentally, although a very large fraction of households pay no (or negative!) income tax, most of they pay net federal tax (due presumably to payroll taxes).
October 27th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
@Sean
How would you respond to this article from the Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122385651698727257.html
Especially the last paragraph where it states that for every extra dollar someone earns above $40k, they only make 60 cents. This provides a disincentive for people to work harder. Obama seems to be assuming that people will never improve their situation. Offering a disincentive to work harder seems to me to defeat the purpose.
Now, about Bush’s tax cuts. In your graph, are you counting the amount of extra taxes everyone will pay (INCLUDING the middle class and poor) when those tax cuts are not renewed? Because, if memory serves, it was a straight percentage cut across the board (which, obviously cuts more for those earning more). So, not only will the rich pay more, but everyone else will pay more. How much will Obama’s refundable tax credits (I refuse to call them tax cuts — see the article above) offset the increased taxes?
Another thing that Bush’s tax cuts did was to create a massively exploding economy. Only in the last 2 years (which, coincides with the time period the Dems took over congress) have we seen a recession, and it is due to Democrat reluctance to regulate Fannie and Freddie (even Clinton says so).
Obama wants to have windfall profits taxes and higher taxes in general on corporations. Have you stopped to think that not only will the oil companies (which are easy to hate) be caught up in this? Intel has made more profit in the last couple of years than any oil company. What will you say when increased taxes on Intel force them to raise the prices of their processors, which will in turn increase the prices of computers and put them further out of reach for the poor? Another problem with higher taxes on corporations is that they employ millions of Americans. What is the most cost effective way to reduce operating costs to offset increased taxes? Cutting jobs. Obama’s taxes will also affect SMALL corporations. LLCs (Limited Liability Corporations) are basically small businesses with more than one owner. They also will be hit with higher taxes simply because they are classified as a corporation rather than a “Small Business”.
As for Obama being a center-left candidate, you could not be more wrong. To be center-left, he would have had to vote (at least once) for something “conservative”. He has never done that. Not once has Obama voted against the Democrat party leaders. I call that far-left. He has also voted against requiring medical care for babies born from a botched abortion, and, despite what he says, the law that was “already on the books” that he said already protected the babies actually did not exist at the time when he was voting against protecting the botched abortion babies. This is a core conservative value, and would seem to be a no-brainer. How could it possibly be bad to require doctors to give care to their patients?
@joe
)
Did you know that the top 1% makes only 20% of the income, but pays 37% of the taxes? And Obama wants to raise their taxes… You are right. That is not fair. (note: I am lower middle class… but with expectations that, with hard work, I can join those at the top one day
October 27th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
I find amusing the Wall Street Editorial pages, which have published a number of editorials, presumably written by intelligent people, about how the Obama tax “increases” will slam small businesses and stifle the economy etc. Yet, so far as I can tell, Obama’s even for the wealthiest people, Obama’s tax increases simply restore taxes to a level at or below those for every year prior to 2001, down to at least WWII, except for 1988-1992.
October 27th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
For the record, when I said that I didn’t fully agree with your conclusions, I was primarily referring to the conclusions about how the term “income redistribution” was being (ab)used by the Republicans. I think that many of them think they are using the term correctly, even if they aren’t.
Personally, I know that this doesn’t exactly equate to communism or socialism and I know that several pro-capitalist economists support the idea with great arguments. My personal jury is still out on whether it’s a good idea or not, but I’m not an economist and we’re about to see (hopefully) a good experiment on the change being done on a nationwide scale in a few months. I hope they’re right.
Finally, many conservatives I know are not the “Screw the poor! I want to be rich, rich, rich!” stereotypes they are made out to be (nor, to be fair, are the liberals I know all closet-Marxists – although there are a few on the extremes of both ends of the scale). Instead, there is a very strong Horatio Alger type individualist ideal among many conservatives that thinks that hard work and dedication is always rewarded and, by contrast, laziness and apathy should be punished. This is why their perception of “income redistribution” rankles them. What I think is missing from the mindset is the fact that hard work and determination are not rewarded proportionally (note that I didn’t say “fairly”), that sometimes if you work hard and are dedicated, you still get crapped on by fate, and that corporations are, for the most part, entities driven by greed with no moral or ethical concerns.
October 27th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Matt– No, I have no real desire to respond to someone who claims “Obama seems to be assuming that people will never improve their situation” and “He has also voted against requiring medical care for babies born from a botched abortion.” Stuff like that does not bode well for a rational conversation conducted in good faith.
However, I cannot resist (Scott Aaronson’s good example notwithstanding) mentioning how dramatically you miss the point. If anyone wants to have a substantive discussion on the fairness on fiscal impact of the actual tax proposals of the candidates — awesome! Debate away, the country needs to hear the best arguments of both sides.
Instead, we are getting accusations of “Socialism!” It’s a cry of desperation from a party in dire straits, and I optimistically look forward to a day when Republicans decide that they will have to try harder.
October 27th, 2008 at 2:22 pm
Matt (#9):
if you look at the tables I linked, you’ll see that’s simply not true.
Granted, if your household makes over $250k a year, then for every dollar raise you get you get to keep “only” 60 cents. But that still seems to me a strong incentive to work harder. Especially because, if you make that kind of money, a promotion doesn’t mean a $5k/yr raise, it means many tens of thousands of dollars, meaning you’re still taking in tens of thousands of more income.
The logic people won’t work for more money, I think, is actually sillier than that. One could argue, for example, that if you make $1M a year, what’s the incentive to work harder for more money? $1M a year provides quite a luxurious lifestyle, and one might argue incentive would be to enjoy that life, rather than spend more time in the office to make more money. So, I think people’s real motivations go a bit deeper.
October 27th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Just a little rhetorical question: How come we don’t describe the flow of massive amounts of USD to fewer and fewer citizens of the US during the last eight years as “income redistribution?” Socialism of risk, born now by we the citizens, has privatized massive amounts of profits protected from US tax codes through changes in the law that allowed “money managers” to only pay at a 15% rate. It is very hard to be a “money manager” if you make $100k, but much easier when you have more than $20 billion in 2008 bonuses waiting to be paid out at the end of the year(even though your corporations are receiving nearly a trillion in bailout money). We have one of the most productive socialist economies of the world, only in that trillions of dollars are distributed to fewer and fewer through specific governmental legislation, rather than the other way around.
October 27th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
Another unspoken assumption: it’s always a good idea to encourage people to work harder. Tax cuts for upper bracket earners probably do encourage them to work harder, and the real estate speculators and hedge fund brokers have obviously been at it 24/7 for the last decade. What exactly were the social benefit of this maniacal effort? Maybe we were better off when bankers worked bankers hours and took long lunches. Fewer foreclosures.
Another odd thing: people who trot out the argument about encouraging hard work, never seem to notice that proposals to cut the taxes of working people also encourage hard work.
October 27th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
Never in my life have I come across anyone who has express this view as a disincentive to work harder at their jobs, and that’s including the decade I spent in the British workforce, where taxes are far higher than they are in the US.
It just doesn’t happen. I have encountered people who have express all kinds of other reasons as to why they stopped working as hard–like balancing work and family and deciding they no longer need to earn more money to live comfortably (yeah, those socialists!), but in 25 years of working, no one has ever said to me “what’s the point? The government takes most of it anyway”.
October 27th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
I wonder why people listen to doctors about the state of their bodies, to physicists about the state of the universe, but not to sociologists about the state of their society.
From a sociologists point of view a lot of the comments here sound like Christian fundamentalists talking astro-physics.
Things like this really hurt.
Of course it is possible for you to reach “the top one day”, but chances are slim to none.
Look at these graphs:
http://contexts.org/socimages/2008/10/27/historical-changes-in-us-income-inequality/
And tell me if you really think, that any kind of justification for it exists.
Also no one outside the US would consider Obama even center-left.
October 27th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
I have been doing a lot of the shoe work for the Obama campaign. I have on occassion, such as this weekend, run into the type who calls Obama a marxist or communist. I have also run into a number of those sullen quite angry types who retort that Obama wants to take their guns away. These people are in the minority fortunately.
I have always said that everyone should read Marx & Engel’s “Communist Manifesto,” of course as well as Adam Smith. This is not about adopting these things as an ideological belief system, but just to know what the hell you are talking about when you call something communism. Obama is also no communist! I know two card carrying members of the Communist party, and believe me calling Obama a Communist amounts to calling a shrub a redwood — it’s an exaggeration of extremes. Obama is not even a socialist, at least if you compare him to the Socialist Worker’s Party. Obama is a basic Democrat from that wing of the party which works with social issues and labor unions. Obama is not really that much of an ideologue at all, which is in his favor.
Economic and political ideologies can all sound really great. Even the GOP ideal of limited government, low taxes, let people use their money as they see fit and so forth can all sound great. The Libertarian types go so far as to concoct a quasi-utopian philosophy based on this. The problem is that these things never work the way they are intended, or more realistically advertized. The three decades of conservative governance has been one of the greatest social engineering periods in history, though the GOP hates the idea of social engineering. The trickle down has really been a gushing up which has enriched the wealthist in the jet-set & country club class. Ever since the 1980s there has been a bifurcation in the middle class, first seen by sloughing off the so called “labor class.” As time goes on $9.00/hr is becoming the “new middle class” left behind by the few in the middle who can reel themselves up to the wealthy class. Redistributing wealth? Yeah the Republicans have been all for that from the beginning, but they are doing in opposite directions from what might be called progressive redistributions. They call their redistributions “good,” and many Americans have been stupid enough to believe it.
Lawrence B. Crowell
October 27th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
Beyond socialism and communism, what’s another system which is based around redistribution of wealth? Capitalism.
Joe the Plumber wants to redistribute wealth from people with clogged drains to his plumbing company. Car companies want to redistribute wealth from car buyers to car dealers and manufacturers. Investment bankers have very complicated methods of redistributing wealth.
The question is not “Should wealth get redistributed?” The question is “Using what methods and with what goals should wealth be redistributed?” Libertarians have one answer, communists have another answer, but they’re still addressing the same question.
October 27th, 2008 at 4:43 pm
Joe Biden doesn’t always say the right thing, but I think he handled the socialist question pretty well here: http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/politics/2008/10/27/sot.biden.marxist.wftv
October 27th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
I have parents who lean conservative, and my mom said Obama was a socialist long before anyone else was. This isn’t for reasons you think- rather, my mom grew up in a communist country (where they were never REALLY communists, or true socialists at that) but several times she’s heard Obama say something that she heard in her youth. So whatever, it’s her opinion and I tend to think the future is not quite so bleak, but I’m just trying to explain the “Obama is a socialist” stance as I have heard it.
October 27th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
A more basic point is that Obama and his team actually have a self-consistent plan to deal with national issues, so even those of us who don’t particularly like it have come to accept that it is better than a collection of planks cobbled together based on who they please, and not what they do.
October 27th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
Yvette,
OK then… Your mom grew up in a communist country that wasn’t really communist or socialist, but she heard Obama say some things (those things you don’t bother to tell us, though) that she heard in her youth and therefore she thinks he’s a socialist even though you’ve made it clear she probably doesn’t know what communist or socialist even means… and this explains why the right is calling Obama a socialist. Whew. Thanks for that clarification!
October 27th, 2008 at 6:48 pm
Sean,
I agree with your post, but the the Republican ticket is simply and clearly anti-scientific:
http://www.slate.com/id/2203120/
This should be enough for everyone who is thoughtful enough to read your blog.
October 27th, 2008 at 8:11 pm
[...] Cosmic Variance has an excellent post on this issue. [...]
October 27th, 2008 at 9:05 pm
Joe the Doubter, you are falling into the error of assuming a given previous tax plan has a sort of “tenure” for benchmarking against newer tax plans (like one that will leave someone with 10% less than before.)
In any case, differential rates (some would even say, differential amounts paid) are redistributing income (not “wealth”) regardless of the exact details, so it is highly phony for anyone to pretend that their rates being flatter would make them not to be “redistributive” – it’s just a matter of degree. But even the Republicans’ premise that they are more against redistribution is flawed. An interesting irony in their “spread the wealth angst” complaints: having a cap gains rate lower than for earned income as conservatives like, spreads wealth in effect from wage earners to CG traders. The latter don’t even do useful work after the original capitalization. Sure, indexing to inflation is a game issue, but for recent turnover the lower rate can’t be justified since most trading is not the valuable initial capitalization.
Also, it is contradictory for them to say on the one hand that tax rates should be flat for fairness and to keep the government from deciding whose money is “better spent” when retained, but on the other to say (and wrongly!) that people buying and selling ownership rights etc. deserve the better cut since their retention of more money is more useful to the economy.
October 27th, 2008 at 9:07 pm
@cmplamer:
Instead, there is a very strong Horatio Alger type individualist ideal among many conservatives that thinks that hard work and dedication is always rewarded and, by contrast, laziness and apathy should be punished.
Two corollaries go along with that idea. 1) The primary cause of poverty is laziness and apathy. 2) “Assistance” should be by individuals and charitable groups, but if it must be made by the government, it should be restricted to the ‘unfortunate’ who can be demonstrated to be impoverished by no fault of their own.
October 27th, 2008 at 10:40 pm
It was a stupid thing for Obama to say and he knows it. If Obama had to do it again he would NEVER had told Joe the Plumber that he wants to spread the wealth
It was a moment of stupid honesty just like Biden had the other day at a fundraiser warning us of the disaster that will be obama.
my problem with sean’s post is that it would not be written if mccain had the said something similar. i doubt sean would write a post acknowledging mccain is right about this.
i want obama to lose for the right reasons. but ill be happy even if he loses for the wrong reasons.
no way no how nobama
October 27th, 2008 at 10:55 pm
Sorry, David, but if you’re looking for fair and balanced political news, you’re in the wrong place. What would possibly make you think that this (physics) blog is obligated to take an impartial stance on the election? Tell it to the New York Times.
I’m also sorry (not really) that despite your very clever catchphrase, Barack Obama will be the next president.
October 28th, 2008 at 12:35 am
For the life of me, I can’t understand why people don’t want to pay a few bucks in taxes to treat other peoples heart conditions. If I have to pay for a fire truck because some stupid libertarian plugged too much crap into his outlet, he should have to pay some for my neighbors chest pains. I think my neighbors chest is more valuable than insured household items. Everyone that hates the idea of taking wealth from other people should refuse to call a fire truck if their house starts burning down.
October 28th, 2008 at 1:25 am
For #23, quickest example I can think of off the top of my head, from his commencement speech at Wesleyan this past spring (they were showing it on CSPAN), Obama at one point said “our individual salvation depends on our collective salvation.” Mum said the same thing in Hungarian; I asked why and she said it was a pretty common slogan when she grew up in the sixties. Was even written on the piece of paper acknowledging the handover of some land the family owned back then.
Link for his talk: http://www.politico.com/pdf/PPM42_remarks_of_obama.pdf
(No link for the deed obviously as it’s sitting in a drawer at her house as a historic artifact, but it’d be in Hungarian even then. So dare I do the impossible on the Internet and ask you to trust me for now, and if you REALLY care I can scan it in whenever I visit?)
As for the socialist vs communist comment I made earlier and probably should have clarified: every Eastern Bloc country was never officially even “socialist” according to the government, but rather working towards pure socialism (the exception being Russia itself, which was deemed socialist and moving towards communism). Sort of like how no, the United States is not really a democracy, and most would call Stalin a communist but he obviously wasn’t redistributing wealth in the way communism (or even socialism) said you should. So my point is it’s kind of silly to get into the whole “he’s a socialist” “no he’s not, because a socialist is defined by…” argument since no politician ever will fit the mold.
October 28th, 2008 at 1:47 am
The fundamental rule of taxation is that you tax activities you wish to discourage. It makes no sense to return taxes to people who never paid them on the thought that by doing so you will encourage them to create jobs or whatever else it is you need to have done to fix the economy. As Churchill clearly pointed out – Taxing your self into prosperity is like trying to lift your self up by the handle while standing in the bucket.
Heck- Saudi Arabia and Russia have more than their share of the world’s oil, let’s go get it. Oh, that kind of redistribution doesn’t make sense? Well neither does Barack’s. If he wants my money, he needs to go out and earn it. If he wants to give money to those less fortunate, he needs to use his checkbook, not mine. I can give mine away without a $90K government bureaucrat in the middle for a rake-off.
October 28th, 2008 at 1:54 am
I keep hearing Palin and McCain say that they are “doing fine” and that “God will intervene on election day” when asked about how they are down in the polls. Do they know something that we don’t? Is this election already rigged? I seriously believe so. The Republicans are rigging the elections in every county in the country and we need to do something about it.
I have an idea to make sure it all goes the way it should in Florida…
October 28th, 2008 at 3:07 am
what really strikes me (as an outsider) in this debate is the republican line of reasoning. currenty, Bush the republican is on a never before seen (well, since the great depression times at least) tour de force of interventionalism. the gouvernment has just decided to buy up to $700 billion of private economy partily against the will of the owners. at the same time they paint democrats as comunists. also, the current republican government has set an amazing record in unbalancing the budget and redistributing wealth into the military-industrial sector. yet they dare to raise this topic to scare voters off the democrats. and this list can be continued. bush enourmously expanded the government, cut on individuals liberties etc. yet the republicans dare to say with a straight face, that all these are things that the democrats would do and this is bad.
i really don’t understand
October 28th, 2008 at 4:38 am
If you are in fact in the higher tax bracket, yes, feel free to be pissed and not vote for Obama. But since there have been similar sentiments expressed on this thread by people who are clearly not, I want to say the following.
If you are middle class or below, and are getting all twitchy because you feel that the tax-plan is “unjust”, and feel the need to defend folks who are much better prepared to protect themselves, then you are being taken for a ride by people who you owe nothing to. Real capitalism is where you watch out for YOUR interests.
The hope that you will one day be able to join their legions, and so you have to watch out for their interests is just a bait for emotional manipulation. The point is not that you aren’t going to realize the American dream. You might. But it still is a bad idea to base your decisions on it, for the immediate future. It is amazing to watch people being fooled by what are essentially abstract irrelevancies as far as they are considered. The point is that the immediate future of the vast majority of Americans looks better under the Obama tax-plan. If you have a real argument why the overall economy would suffer if he taxes big companies, then there would be more merit to your arguments. But imagined unfairness to a minority in the population simply is not an argument.
The tax plan is not something written in stone – if there comes a time when the national interest is more in alignement to the interests of the wealthy, it can be changed.
It is a powerful strategy of people who own wealth and power, to sell their interests as patriotism and fairness to the vast majority who don’t have wealth or power. National interests are often identified with the interests of a handful. It is simply NOT unpatriotic to tax corporations, period. It might or might not be bad economic policy depending on the state of the country. Right now, the US needs to stand on its feet before trying to fly.
Blacklisting certain words (like “income redistribution”) is merely a strategy. There is nothing black and white about any word or phrase, all depends on what it is used for. Lets hope for that day when the gullible sector of the population learns to avoid swallowing it hook, line and sinker.
October 28th, 2008 at 6:40 am
[...] an intelligent analysis, go to Cosmic Variance. You can listen to the entire interview here, in RealPlayer. As an Obama supporter, all I can say [...]
October 28th, 2008 at 9:23 am
Hey kevin, what makes you so sure you deserved all the money you got in the first place? If employed, what logical technique does your employer use to determine your “marginal value” (how much more money the company earns with you than without you”) considering that employees are sort of like organs in the body: they work together so we can’t explicitly ID just how much “value” the spleen provides, or the heart versus lungs (couldn’t live missing either one) etc. So how do we know you deserved that much, compared to someone working at 7-11? Can you prove that you do? Do you really think the CEOs making hundreds times more than most of us really produce that much ‘real value’ into the economy, or do you realize they are paid by insider Boards more to (the irony!) redistribute customer spending from other companies to theirs – yeah, important to *their own* interests but worthless *to me* in terms of “total net utility” value for the society/economy as a whole!
If you make money from investing, you know that the “funny money” operation of the Fed monetizes debt and so inflates the money supply based on credit expansion – you get more than you possibly could in a true, hard-currency to goods free trading market. And finally, if you don’t like “redistribution” by tax rates, than are you going to prove your honesty by opposing a cap gains rate (in advance of inflation indexing, which I support – I mean, the base CG tax rate before any “time” adjustments) which is lower than the tax on people who, ironically, actually did work hard to produce new value and earn the money directly? I don’t want my earned income to be redistributed to worthless traders/traitors, got that?
thanks
October 28th, 2008 at 9:29 am
Aaron, please tell us where you saw “God will intervene” comments, etc – I want to check it out, and yes we should worry about Diebold and such creepy stuff. Look at these links:
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen/
http://www.gregpalast.com/rolling-stone-its-already-stolen/
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
Heh, I enjoy the schadenfreude since this time, the SoS of OH is Democrat Jennifer Brunner who is getting the same vote-suppression complaints from Republicans as the creepy Republican Kenneth Blackwell did in 2004!
October 28th, 2008 at 9:33 am
[Needed update - in CV thread "Going Out on a Limb" below, the "God will intervene" remark comes from Sarah Palin - but I think she's just expression a common fundie attitude that theological God (not political machinations) puts a "thumb" on the scales on behalf of certain forces and nations in history. She's hoping for that to get them through, and that's great because maybe they won't try as hard in real life.]
October 28th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
Neil, re: your comments in #37, you make as much money as your employer thinks you are worth. Capitalism is pretty clear on that- you don’t get $20/hour working at 7-11 because the labor you provide is not valued as worth that much.
A CEO, on the other hand, has his salary decided by the board of a company. If they think he’s worth $250k a year then fine, it’s their company and if that’s the sort of money they think they need to pay it is literally their business. IRC, Ben and Jerry’s ran into a problem in the 1980s where they had salaries capped at 5x whatever the lowest salary was for an employee in the company; they ended up changing that rule when the ~$80,000 for a CEO wasn’t enough to entice an outsider.
October 28th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
Neil B @37
Are you saying that you know how to measure “total net utility” of each of us to the economy/society as a whole?
October 28th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Yvette, Roman:
That’s it, you get what your employer “thinks” you’re worth, which proves nothing about “how hard you work” etc. Is there anything objective in that? How can we know the actual magnitude of work, it isn’t like mass or charge. No Yvette and Roman, I’m not saying I do know how to measure net utility; I’m saying that nobody really does, including employers and economists they might hire to get “objectivity” in the equation. So, how can they possibly pay people according to objectively “how hard they work”? That’s the point.
Hence psychology, class sentiments, etc. are mostly behind what people get paid. Therefore, it’s hard to argue, it’s wrong to tax soandso who “earns” (is paid, according to someone/s’ mere opinion in most cases) 10x of me at a higher rate than me – because we don’t have a way to prove that other person really contributed 10X worth of output, productivity, whatever you want to call it – to the economy.
Actually, consider that employers can offer higher gross pay to offset taxes anyway. If net pay is the actual “sale” of the labor from being the “observed quantity” – that likely means that higher-earners aren’t even losing out in relative terms compared to without the taxation. Few appreciate this issue.
Haven’t you wondered, how companies can complain about “worker salaries” making them uncompetitive for export, but still paying so much to CEOs? The pressure to do so derives from corporate Boards not really paying for value in a free market. In a true market economy, purchasers must allocate (as money, a zero-sum game at a point in time) from their own scarce buying power. If I spend my own money, I won’t pay $400 for a haircut unless it is damn good for me, because I’d have $400 less to buy other things. But the Board members don’t use their own personal money! They use control to allocate company funds – if they decide to pay the CEO 10 M instead of 5M, no skin off their personal backs. They still have whatever they earn as members regardless. Hence there is no responsible pressure for thrift as there is for a genuine market buyer.
As for B&J’s: Their main problem was, they couldn’t compete with other companies that used the system above. If employees had to be paid in such a way that the allocator had that much less remaining for his own use, that would be like a single proprietor or direct shareholder control. There would be little incentive to pay huge salaries. If all companies were organized differently or faced tax disincentives to pay a wide gap, the ones that wanted a smaller gap could compete.
Well, does “capitalism” require letting companies do as they please? No, it doesn’t. Regardless of how much “natural freedom” individuals may have to buy and sell including of labor, corporations are artificial entities given rights, from the government, of limited liability and limited (and not by enough) legal personhood. Groups like that, versus individuals, do not have such rights by natural law or whatever source you think offers them to individuals. Hence government/society has the right to demand conduct according to some permitted rules and charter for corporations, including how much to pay, etc. I can’t prove that individuals (like tree-trimmers asking householders for work) are subject to such a quid pro quo, but corporations certainly are.
Note of course that nothing in the argument “of principle” over taxation and regulation rights proves that high rates or many regulations etc. are good. It only shows that taxation and regulation have a right and foundation for their very existence.
October 28th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
[...] are at it, you may want to help her and the rest of the people on your family email-kitten-chain what the phrase “redistribute wealth” actually means when it is not Grumpy Old Man code …. [CosmicVariance] · More grump, this time from Biden: Noted speech impediment victim Marnie Hall [...]
October 28th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
Some conservatives (and this is probably a very small minority) aren’t just attacking the idea of “income redistribution”, but the repeated claim that Sen. Obama will lower the income taxes on 95% of Americans. Given that a significant percentage of Americans do not pay any income taxes at all, this figure sounds dubious until you realize that the tax credits he is proposing would create a negative tax burden on the lower income tax paying population – in other words, it would result in “refunds” when there was no money payed in to refund.
But this argument ignores the fact that Americans who don’t pay income taxes still pay payroll taxes. The factcheck.org article on this says:
October 28th, 2008 at 9:40 pm
Sorry, accidentally clicked “submit” before pasting the quote from factcheck.org, which was:
October 29th, 2008 at 11:09 am
Using tax revenue to build roads or museums isn’t redistributing wealth, its using funds for the common good. Redistributing wealth is taxing wealthy people and handing out the money to lower income people, whether through welfare or government controlled/sponsored health care. For the record I voted for Obama, but this is one area where I disagree with policies that are inline with the democratic party. In my opinion the best tax system would be a flat tax rate of say 17%. There should be no deductions for anything. Remember a lot of wealthy people minimize their taxes with lots of deductions.
The fact is high rates of taxation do constrain the economy by limiting disposable income. My income has increased dramatically over the past 5 years, but when it went through the ranges of what might be considered upper middle income my taxes also jacked up so much that my take home pay barely increased. So as the Republicans point out, where is the incentive to innovate? The best thing is the flat tax so you aren’t punished for going up the ladder. If everyone is taxed at the same rate wealthy people are still paying much higher taxes.
October 29th, 2008 at 11:55 am
A lower tax rate for lower incomes lowers the burden on companies who hire low skilled low income workers, because the net income has to be above some minumum level.
People who make a lot of money tend to spend a larger fraction of their money on goods and services that benefit foreign countries. E.g. they tend to travel more abroad. So, by taxing the rich more and spending the tax money on projects at home (and not on Iraq), you benefit the economy.
If you make increase the costs of companies to hire low skilled workers, then the production involving cheap labor goes abroad, e.g. to China. This is why the US has a trade deficit with China.
The net amount of taxes the governement collects should also go up a lot. This will allow the government to start big projects like building bases on the Moon and on Mars, developing nuclear fusion. The money needed to fund these projects are not that big compared to the net output of the US economy. By engaging in these difficult projects, a lot of new technologies will be developed that will benefit everyone.
Currently, a lot of the output of the economy goes to waste in the form of things like the production of beer, lipstift, Big Macs etc. etc.
What’s wrong with increasing taxes which may lead people to buy a little less Big Macs and leading to some job losses at McDonald’s and Fatburger, if you get more jobs for highly skilled people at NASA and if we get nuclear fusion a few decades earlier?
October 29th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
I couldn’t agree more with this post. I am glad to see Sean applying his considerable analytical skills to the question of what constitutes fair tax policy and economic justice.
The monetary view states that there needs to be enough money in an economy to meet the demand for the efficient exchange of goods and services. Excess money is necessarily and naturally devalued (inflation). Hoarding money creates false demand. If you save more than you will ever actually need in your life that excess will eventually dilute the value of all money in circulation (inflation). The wealthy person’s demand for ever more money and the creation of false demand through financial speculation is more destructively inflationary than a tight labor market or the wage demands of unions. The current bailout plan is an attempt to prevent the evaporation of a huge amount of artificially created wealth (created through the false demand of speculative derivatives) while preventing the inflationary effects of injecting hundreds of billions into the general economy. The only way to do that is to take it back through taxes. The only fair (and least disruptive) way to do that is to tax the wealthy individuals and institutions who are primarily benefiting from the bailout.
Jane Goodall tells what happened when a large pile of bananas is presented to a troop of chimps. The alpha male sat on top of it and wouldn’t let any other chimp near. He sat there and ate what he wanted while most of the fruit rotted away. Humans are social animals that are supposed to be smarter than chimps. We shouldn’t be fooled by promises that in a capitalist economy anybody who wants can become as wealthy as they want. Soon the dollar would be worth exactly one rotten banana. Progressive taxes can moderate inflation and protect the reasonable levels of savings that reasonable people aspire to.
October 30th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
I think that the idea that people work ‘harder’ to earn more money is largely false. I don’t think a big oil executive making $50,000,000 a year is working 1,000 times harder than a construction worker making $50,000 a year.
You can increase your income somewhat by working harder, but only up to the point where you’re working ‘very hard’. Beyond that you have to improve your income by working at things that are higher value, generally by gaining experience and skill, or applying skills in different markets (say, managing a plumbing company instead of doing skilled plumbing work)
So to say that a progressive tax rate is a disincentive for people to work harder is, I think, completely wrong. It might be disappointing to find that one has to pay more taxes as one’s income increases, but because that advancement isn’t linear with an increase in the exhaustiveness of the work, it doesn’t provide a disincentive to increase one’s income.
October 30th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
The great expansion of the American economy in the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s took place when the highest marginal rates were astronomically high by current standards. Instead of preventing growth, they probably furthered it. In the absence of redistribution through progressive taxation, the best off would probably gambled on speculative financial investments rather than putting money into plant, personnel, and research to increase the productive capacity of the economy–anyhow that’s been the basic pattern in the U.S. since the 70’s.
October 30th, 2008 at 10:04 pm
There are several misconceptions of basic economic principles on this thread, so I’ll address only one: that taxation effects behavior.
Take a simple, albeit extreme example: suppose we live in a society where we can consume either pizzas or hamburgers (not a very healthy place
. Both hamburgers and pizza’s cost $10, and equal amounts of both are consumed. Now suppose a ‘pizza tax’ of $1000 is imposed. Pizza consumption would plummet to zero, pizza production would fall and no pizza tax revenue would be collected. Additionally, consumption of hamburgers would skyrocket.
Now slowly decrease the pizza tax to say $10 (so that pizzas now cost $20). Pizza consumption would rise, but it would still be less than if there were no pizza tax in the first place. People would simply consume more hamburgers because it was more economical.
So it is with work. If you impose taxation on work (income tax) of say %100 people will not work, they have no economic incentive to do so (they will have an awful lot of leisure time however). If anything, the experience with communist countries backs up this argument. If you raise income taxes to %100 (effectively communism) labor supply will diminish and economic growth will drop to zero. Now lower from 100% to something less than %100 and people will work, just not nearly as much as if they had no income tax at all.
Of course, with no income tax there would be a huge drop in government revenues, so that is not optimal either. The key is to find the tax rate that optimizes both labor supply (hence economic growth) and tax revenues.
October 30th, 2008 at 10:28 pm
yes and absurd people are saying 36.9% is socialism and 36%
is good old “Real American” capitalism
October 31st, 2008 at 4:35 pm
[...] An identically named post appeared a while back at Cosmic Variance. A well written post with charts, video, and well thought out discussion. If you haven’t been [...]
November 1st, 2008 at 5:05 pm
@Jim
“The great expansion of the American economy in the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s took place when the highest marginal rates were astronomically high by current standards.”
You need to re-read your history books. The American economy contracted by over 50% during the 30s alone. We also had recessions during the late 40s and 50s. The tax hikes (among other bad policies, ex. contraction of the money supply by 33%, hike in tariffs) of the early 30s took us from a recession to a depression.
November 1st, 2008 at 5:40 pm
@Sean:”joe– People in the top 0.1% of earners are those who make over $2,832,449 per year. They were the primary beneficiaries of the Bush tax cuts. Restoring their tax burden to Clintonian levels is not tantamount to socialism.”
He never mentioned socialism but you did. Republicans calling Obama a socialist is bad. But you talking about socialism when someone brings up a reasonable criticism of Obama is just as bad. BTW, it does not bode well for reasonable discussion when you get basic facts wrong. Obama will not restore the tax burden of the top 0.1% to Clintonian levels…he will increase it far beyond that. If Obama only rescinded the Bush tax cuts then you would be right. But he is forcing the rich to pay for social security. This is a massive tax increase which might not even increase tax revenues if it puts us on the wrong side of the lafler curve (Matt describes this above).
November 1st, 2008 at 5:54 pm
“Excess money is necessarily and naturally devalued (inflation). Hoarding money creates false demand. If you save more than you will ever actually need in your life that excess will eventually dilute the value of all money in circulation (inflation). The wealthy person’s demand for ever more money and the creation of false demand through financial speculation is more destructively inflationary than a tight labor market or the wage demands of unions.”
If you hoard money it leads to deflation not inflation. Keynes banana economy illustrates this. Increased demand for money is inherently deflationary not inflationary. Your argument is hard to understand because it seems like your confused. Increasing money supply is inflationary. Increasing credit is generally inflationary since banks since loans result in more money.
Additional demand for something increases its price whereas increasing supply for something decreases its price. When the price of money (i.e. the goods required to purchase a dollar) increases this is called deflation and the reverse is called inflation. When you go to a grocery store you can think of it as the grocery store purchasing money from you using food.
November 1st, 2008 at 10:02 pm
In the forty years from 1930 to 1970, US per capita GDP tripled in constant dollars. In the next 36 years, despite the fact that there has been no great depression in that period, it only doubled. Of course, since inequality has increased considerably over the last several decades, the apparent growth in per capita wealth is a bit misleading since a disproportionate part of it went to a small group at the top–real incomes have stagnated, especially in recent years. The point isn’t that the greater growth of the earlier years was somehow caused by high top bracket tax rates but simply that high bracket top rates hardly prevented the economy from preforming splendidly. (Numbers are from Angus Maddison’s spreadsheets)
I don’t know anybody who is suggesting that we revert to the 91% top rate of the Eisenhower years, but the current rate is too low if we want to discourage yet more crazy speculative activity. Effectively cutting the payroll tax would be even more helpful.
November 6th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
Well, it seems that the American people aren’t too bothered by any notions of a just redistribution of wealth after all.
November 13th, 2008 at 6:55 pm
@Mark
How do you define “just redistribution”? Probably as one that doesn’t take from you