Whatever happened to noblesse oblige? It was once thought incumbent upon the privileged to act with generosity to those in need if only to keep the tumbrils and guillotine at bay. We live in a time of growing inequality, yet it’s the well-off who often can be heard loudly bemoaning their fate and attacking the greedy poor for expecting the rich to do something to help them. Perhaps the winners have always thought this way about the losers, but it was once thought impolite, not to mention impolitic, to say so. No longer. We now live in a country of sore winners.
No one is likely to forget Mitt Romney dismissing 47 percent of the American people as spongers who refuse to earn their keep and expect a handout from self-made heirs like himself. It’s not a new Republican trope. In 1920, Warren G. Harding, among the worst presidents in history, dismissed the same people as “the parasite percentage.”
When Fed chairman Janet Yellen warned recently that rising income inequality threatened the health of the economy, Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-SC) told her, “You’re sticking your nose in places you have no right to be.” In the same vein, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) recently sneered at anyone complaining about Republican plans to eliminate the estate tax which only affects households with over $10 million. “It sounds to me like there’s a lot of wealth envy in this country,” she opined.
Good guess. In the good old days, the poor and middle classes could be counted on to bow and scrape and keep a civil tongue in their heads, not to get all uppity because they had no money, foreclosed homes, jobs sent overseas and underfunded schools for their kids. Foxx belongs to the Ebenezer Scrooge wing of her party. It shares his view that rather than complain, the poor should die and “reduce the surplus population.
Trouble is, a large percentage of the population, including voters who haven’t been barred from the polls because of their age, ethnicity or race, has noticed the growing income inequality and their dimming prospects. So Republicans running for office have been forced to admit it exists and pretend they care. GOP congressional leaders and presidential candidates including Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, and Paul Ryan have all borrowed the same statistics their opponents have been brandishing – notably the fact that more wealth is in the hands of the top one percent than at any time since 1928. We all recall how badly that spree ended.
But after admitting the obvious, the Republicans don’t rush to propose solutions but to blame the Obama administration. Since the statistic has come to their attention during his time in office, it’s his fault. They continue to insist that government shouldn’t do anything to help the poor and middle class. Rather it should do more to help the job creators at the top. A few Republicans have taken the daring step of criticizing crony capitalism for favoring some rich people over others, thereby perverting the unfettered operation of the free market. But their solution is to cut back the government so it has no money to share with cronies. If markets are left free to reward the few and exploit the many without government meddling, all will be right with the world.
This thinking is enshrined in the proposed Republican budget which aims to cut anything that helps those in need – Pell grants for students, Obamacare and Medicaid for the ill, food stamps and lunch programs for poor children. Their dream is that eventually Social Security and Medicare can be privatized. Dana Milbank in the Washington Post notes that, with the money freed up by their proposed cuts, the Republican budget would eliminate the estate tax, capital gains taxes and other impediments to the burgeoning plutocracy.
The result would be a $269 billion tax break for the top two-tenths of one percent of earners – or just 5,500 households. No reason for wealth envy in this plan, do you think? Paul Ryan has complained that the estate tax is devastating to family farms, yet only 120 small businesses and farms were liable to the tax last year. Oddly, there is nary a peep from Ryan and his ilk about the tens of millions devastated by 40 years of wage stagnation, unemployment, underemployment and shrinking opportunities.
Those often touted laboratories of democracy, state governments, have already shown how Republican policies regarding income inequality and economic opportunity look in practice. Maine, South Carolina and Ohio among others have cut the progressive income tax and raised regressive sales taxes. Gov. Brownback of Kansas, whose supply side budget has put the state budget in the red while cutting services, proposes to balance it by slashing $45 million from education. Governors Jindal in Louisiana and Walker in Wisconsin have done the same, slashing $300 million from state colleges. To get ahead, get a loan. Possibly, as Mitt Romney once suggested, from your millionaire father.
Those who complain about such priorities are dismissed as bleeding hearts, socialists, or fools for not realizing what’s good for the rich and big business is good for everyone. Words fail me, but as income inequality soared in the 1920s they did not fail “The American Mercury” of George Jean Nathan and H.L. Mencken. It tartly suggested that anyone who believed the interests of capital and labor to be the same might as well say “that the interests of landlord and tenant, hangman and condemned, cat and rat are identical.”