COMMENTARY
Rod Watson: Have-nots to Haves: Bring it on
Not since George Armstrong Custer has anyone gone into battle so badly outnumbered. Yet as federal and state efforts to help the little guy and restore tax fairness gain momentum, the minority who might pay more are massing at the country club under the banner of “class warfare.”
What has the hoity-toity so hot?
For some, it’s President Obama’s plan to let tax cuts for the wealthy expire and give tax breaks to the other 95 percent. For others, it’s the effort by New York’s social-justice groups to raise taxes a bit on the wealthy to avoid state cuts that would devastate everyone else.
But if you look at the numbers, this fight should be no contest.
According to U.S. Census Bureau data, only about 4.5 million households earn $200,000 or more in income. That compares with nearly 108 million households below that threshold.
Even the stock market swoon hasn’t much changed the inequity. From 2006 to 2007, the share of the country’s aggregate income raked in by just the top 5 percent barely declined, from 22.3 percent to 21.2 percent. Meanwhile, the share grabbed by those in the top 20 percent dwindled by less than a percentage point, from 50.5 percent to a mere 49.7 percent.
It makes you scratch your head over this call to man the bank vaults and batten down the safe-deposit boxes because the rich are under siege.
In the meantime, the drum major for economic injustice repeats his traitorous rant wherever there’s a camera or microphone. Curiously, entertainer Rush Limbaugh maintains fans despite his obvious disdain for them, their 401(k)s and their futures.
Limbaugh says he hopes Obama’s recovery program fails. Translation: His ego is so big that he’d rather see the country go down the tubes than be proven wrong about the president’s economic agenda. But he can afford to say that. Like the chicken hawks who started the real war, Limbaugh—with his $400 million contract—isn’t on the front lines of the economic war.
Maybe that’s why the Rev. Darius Pridgen laughs at the mention of “class warfare.”
“There’s always been class warfare in the United States of America,” says the pastor of True Bethel Baptist Church, which hosts one of several statewide Fair Share Tax Reform rallies at 4 p.m. today.
Pridgen is right. It’s just that you never hear the term when the other side — investment bankers, Wall Street traders, executives in private jets— is winning.
Only when there’s the slightest effort to spread the tax burden a little more fairly does the phrase get dredged up.
“I think we’re hearing it from the individuals who are benefiting from the current distribution of wealth,” said Allison Duwe, executive director of the Coalition for Economic Justice.
Those are the folks who make the campaign contributions that buy “access” to policymakers.
“The ‘haves’ have power,” Pridgen says, explaining why their argument gains any traction at all when they are so badly outnumbered by average working folk.
Still, this economy may change the balance of power. People used to talk about “old money” or “new money”; now it’s the old poor and the new poor. Today’s rally will be on behalf of the have-nots, the used-to-haves and the may-not-have- for-longs.
The talk about “class warfare” may, in fact, do what many have been trying to do for years: remind people which class they’re really in, especially after eight years of George W. Bush.
So if the wealthy really want a war that pits the classes, I have only two things to say:
Bring it on . . . and mission accomplished.
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