John McCain apparently struck a chord with many people when he identified Barack Obama’s ‘spread the wealth around’ comment as ‘class warfare’ resulting from ‘the politics of envy.’
But what the candidate may not realize is the degree to which similar class warfare has shaped existing programs. Hmmm … There could be a real opportunity here for McCain. Imagine what it could do for his candidacy if he led a crusade to eliminate all such ‘wealth spreading’ from government!
Take Social Security. Few people realize how much this program is shot through with class-warfare-driven income redistribution. One such feature is that the formula used to calculate your monthly benefit, based on your historic monthly earnings, is skewed to cheat the people who have worked the hardest.
Thus, if you didn’t have sufficient brains or gumption to average more than, say, $750 a month, Social Security will pay you 87 percent of that amount — for the rest of your life. With that kind of deal, why not retire as soon as you can?
And if you were willing to put in a little sweat and averaged $3,000 per month, you get only 46 percent of that amount.
But if you had the guts and ability to really excel, perhaps by building a successful small business, thus averaging $10,000 a month, you won’t get a Social Security check equal to even one-fourth of that. The more you earned, the smaller the proportion you get back. Talk about socialism!
Social Security taxes the hard-working, successful folks and gives them a measly return while making life easier for the widows, orphans and disabled people who earned little or nothing. What kind of a system is that?
Now, Barack Obama is talking about taxing a hard-working plumbing business owner earning $250,000 a year to lower the taxes of someone who only produces $50,000.
This is class warfare — the politics of envy run amok. Just as higher income or capital gains taxes reduce incentives to work and invest, so do Social Security benefit formulas that give smaller and smaller “replacement ratios” as your income rises.
These efficiency-robbing, socialistic provisions have been in place for decades, apparently because the working people of this country are unaware of them.
But it is time to root them out, and John McCain is the renegade with the guts to do it.
It’s time to return FICA taxes to their rightful owners in a fair way, with the same flat-rate replacement ratio for everyone.
Anyone who has the courage to criticize ethanol programs in an Iowa primary should be able to look the slacker half of the baby-boom generation in the eye and tell them the nation is not going to tolerate them living high in retirement on the sweat of their harder-working fellow citizens just because their parents and grandparents were able to pull it off for decades. It is time to drive a stake through the heart of this pernicious idea of “spread the wealth around” for once and for all.
© 2008 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.