A Perverted Idea of Fairness
by Joe Conason | October 21, 2008
Wherever John McCain appears on the stump in these waning days of the presidential campaign, he is always accompanied by his imaginary friend “Joe the Plumber,” but it is the specter of Karl Marx that lurks just offstage. Reverting back to the Republicanism of eons ago, when he was just a child, he inveighs against the “socialist” design of Barack Obama’s tax platform. This delusional ranting, like so much of Mr. McCain’s behavior this year, tell us nothing about Mr. Obama (or socialism!) but much about him.
Let’s begin with the dishonesty of the McCain rant. What Mr. Obama proposes is to restore the tax rates on the wealthy to the same level as during the Clinton administration – that is, to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire without renewing them for individuals and families reporting more than $250,000 in annual income. There is nothing radical in this idea, let alone socialistic, (especially compared with the bank nationalizations and other violations of capitalist orthodoxy that Mr. McCain has supported recently as emergency measures).
Not only is there nothing radical about repairing the unfairness of those Bush tax cuts, but it is precisely the same position that Mr. McCain argued when they were first enacted. Is his memory so poor that he cannot remember saying that the Bush tax plan was “skewed” to benefit the rich? Having reversed that position for political convenience in the most craven way, he has also invented a different justification for opposing Mr. Bush back then – namely that he thought the cuts were fiscally irresponsible. But that isn’t what he said in 2000 and 2001.
Now let’s address the ignorance of his rant. Progressive taxation is a tradition of Western economics that dates back considerably further than Marx and the Communist manifesto, with all due respect to the wingnuts who seem to be writing those McCain speeches. He admits that he has neglected his economic studies, so perhaps he isn’t aware that Adam Smith, the revered philosopher of market capitalism, advocated tax fairness as far back as 1776, the fateful year when he published the first edition of The Wealth of Nations.
Although there was no income tax, Smith’s principled judgment on the justice of higher taxes on those who could pay more, enunciated on several occasions, could not be clearer. He favored property taxes and luxury taxes because they would fall most heavily on the wealthy. He would have levied a sizeable tax on all seven of the McCain homes plus an additional chop at all of Cindy McCain’s credit card binges.
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http://www.observer.com/2008/politics/perverted-idea-fairness
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