Rigging the game
This column was first published on October 26, 2010 at Washington Square News.
The popular notion that President Obama is a socialist was likely born on Shrewsbury Street in Holland, Ohio, on Oct. 12, 2008. Then-Democratic nominee Obama was confronted by a local plumber named Joe Wurzelbacher (well-known as “Joe the Plumber”) who was unhappy with Obama’s plan to raise taxes for those making more than $250,000 a year. Obama, in one of his first public political blunders, said, “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”
Secret socialist Obama was given life.
But wasn’t Obama right? Well, OK, not everyone benefits from so-called “redistribution” of wealth. The rich certainly don’t. But do conservatives have the intellectual ammo to say that “[spreading] the wealth” is not the right thing to do?
Arthur C. Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, has a new book out titled “The Battle: How the Fight Between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America’s Future.” He harps on a hackneyed conservative moral argument: that government oppresses the rich and productive to benefit the poor and undeserving. This is unjust, he says, because in America anyone who wants to succeed can. We have something called equality of opportunity.
And this seems like a pretty compelling point. If the rules of the game are fair, and no one starts out with any arbitrary advantages (read: cheats), then the winner probably does deserve victory in some sense. But if the game is rigged, you certainly can’t blame someone for not coming out on top.
You can tell where I’m going with this. If the economy is the game, and getting rich is victory, then the game is most definitely rigged in the United States. Contrary to what conservatives say, some Americans start out life with undue privilege that the majority do not. That is why, according to the Center for American Progress, intergenerational mobility — a good measure of equality of opportunity — is relatively poor in the U.S.
Someone born in a low-income family has a 1 percent chance of striking it rich (defined as being in the top 5 percent of Americans in terms of income). High-income children have a 22 percent chance of achieving the same thing. And it’s easy to see why. The cost of providing for the health and higher education of children has skyrocketed, while the quality of public secondary education has stagnated. Appallingly, among developed nations, only in the United Kingdom does your parents’ income serve as a better predictor of your income than in the U.S.
This turns the conservative argument against income redistribution on its head. They say inequality is justified only because we all have the chance to earn what we wish. Lamentably, though, many Americans never have a chance. The rich might not benefit from high taxes, but they have already benefited from the handicap of lower-income groups in a competitive economy. Is it really so far-fetched to say they should give some of that back to correct this arbitrary inequality? I suspect even a certain plumber from Ohio could grasp that logic.
