I suppose I should take seriously the possibility that too much obsessing about Joe the Plumber might make a person go blind. But my excuse is that what follows isn't really about Joe; it's about what McCain is really saying by using Joe as his poster boy.
I keep thinking about the sneer on McCain's lips when he delivered the line "Congratulations, Joe. You're rich!"
Hmmm... If Joe works hard and earns a quarter of a million a year, I dont' mind at all. But what McCain was up to, whether he even sees it himself, was something like this: most plumbers don't make anywhere near $250,000 a year. As Paul Krugman points out in the Times today, the figure in Ohio is more like $48,000. That's the sort of person who comes to mind when we think about plumbers. And so when McCain sneers "Congratulations, Joe, you're rich!" what he's hoping is that we'll have the typical plumber fixed in our minds as we try to think about a highly aytpical case. If the real Joe's income is anywhere near a typical plumber's, then he certainly isn't rich. But if the real Joe really makes $250,000 a year, then whether we call him rich or not, he is very comfortable. He makes five times what the average Ohio plumber makes.
It was actually a clever rhetorical trick: rely on the power of the stereotype to run interference when we try to imagine a highly unusual case. The sneer only works so long as the stereotype holds sway.
And then there was that other line: "America didn’t become the greatest nation on earth by spreading the wealth, We became the greatest nation by creating new wealth."
Sorry. It's true that creating new wealth was crucial. But as the country struggled to rise out of the Great Depression, the New Deal programs of Franklin Roosevelt were part of what kept the nation great. Some kinds of wealth spreading -- a progressive tax scheme, Medicare, Head Start, PELL grants and the like really are part of what distinguishes America from some countries that we don't want to be like. Of course we should value hard work, and of course it should be rewarded. But of course we should also want to be the kind of society that doesn't grind people down. Creating a decent society doesn't come for free. If part of the price is a bump in the marginal tax rates of very high earners, why should anyone sneer?
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Fairness is a virtue. In sports games fairness is achieved by having officials to judicate and enforce the rules. It is not achieved by giving a bad team a large head start so they might be able to compete evenly with the good team. Everyone would agree that this is unfair because the good team should not be punished for being a good team, unless they are somehow cheating.
Hi,
I'm not sure the analogy is a good one. One difference -- among others -- is that whether or not someone decides to enter a sports competition is entirely optional. If I'm not good at basketball (and believe me, I'm not), then I can simply spend my time doing other things. But for the most part, people don't have a choice about whether they are part of the economy. So fairness in the sense of following the rules, whatever they may be, is indeed a virtue. But what the rules should be and what values are relevant besides fairness in this narrow sense is another question.
We can make the purely logical point this way: the severely handicapped can't compete economically at all. If the sense of fairness that seems to lie behind your analogy were the only relevant value, then we'd point out that providing them with compensation or assistance would be "unfair" and leave it at that. Many people (me, for instance) wouldn't agree. "Fairness" isn't the only thing that matters here.
Some would say: any aid provided should be at the discretion of individuals who are moved to provide it, and using the force of government to make the rest of us help, the thought would go, is unjust and wrong.
However tempting that conclusion may be from a certain point of view, it's a point of view which presupposes a good deal that's open to argument. Needless to say, the matter can't be settled in a few dozen words, but fairness as you've framed it is one among many competing principles.
(BTW: the example of the severely handicapped isn't meant to be general or all-purpose. It's only meant to show that a certain line of reasoning is subject to exception. Sorting out the range of exceptions is a big question.)
Thanks for taking the time to comment. I really do appreciate it!
Dr. Stairs you raised a lot of issues in your post. "Anonymous" addressed only one of them, but I think it is something very fundamental to ideas of tax breaks an economy and the like.
Correct me if I'm wrong (not that you wouldn't) but I guess the idea of raising taxes on the top 5% of the earners is something along the lines of saying "OK, the economy and the society of this country helped you a lot in getting to where you are, and where you are is someplace very comfortable and successful. As such you owe the economy and society of this country for helping you out."
I agree that this is something to be taken into account, for sure, but at the same time, the argument can also be made that increasing taxes on this top 5% is almost a penalty for being successful. I am not in this top 5%, but if I was I think having my taxes increased would not sit too well with me. I'd rather make my own decisions, I think, as to issues of helping out the welfare of others (which is something I certainly would do, being in this top 5%). I am sure there are others who would not, though.
I have been thinking a bit about the issue of fairness and equal opportunities for people withing society and the economy and I can't help think about Darwin's idea of survival of the fittest... I'm sure this comes off as somewhat heartless and cruel, but I cannot seem to put it out of my mind.
Anyway, just some thoughts. Thanks for an interesting write up.
Hi Erik,
I think your point about punishment for success was perhaps part of what our anonymous friend had in mind.
One could, of course adopt a Darwinian model, but the obvious problem is that even if "survival of the fittest" is a fact about the workings of the world in the wild, we can't get from there to the conclusion that it's a good moral model for the way we arrange society.
Different people will, indeed, have different reactions here and there's no easy way to sort it all out. But one thought that has occurred to me runs along these lines. (This is half-baked; just thinking out loud.) If I earn $30,000 a year, then the value of a marginal $100 is relatively high for me. If I earn, say, $250,000, then the value of a marginal $100 is not very high for me at all. It's the old point about the diminishing marginal utility of money; obviously if I earned $10,000,000 a year, a difference of $100 either way is virtually meaningless; it will make no discernible difference to my welfare.
You can see where this is going. And I'm well aware: it's a tricky argument to push. But the thought in canned form is this: if we want everyone to pull his/her "fair share," then we need to take account of the diminishing marginal utility of money.
BTW... I think I can say truthfully: if I made $250,000 a year, I would not only not object to a higher marginal tax rate, but would actually think it was appropriate. (And it helps to keep fixed clearly in mind that we're talking about marginal rates. I would be taxed in the first $50,000 or whatever at the same rate as anyone else. It's only on dollars that mean increasingly less to my welfare that I would be taxed at a somewhat higher rate.)
Anyway, lots to argue about here :-) Thanks for posting!
Good point about the rhetorical impact of "Joe the Plumber". . . I hadn't figured out why people w/o much money seemed to identify with someone who has (or claimed to have) a lot more money. . .
I hadn't understood that about marginal tax rates, either. So everyone's taxed at X rate for the first M thousand dollars, and everyone's taxed at Y rate for the next N thousand dollars, you're saying? (And if you only have M thousand dollars, don't worry, you won't be asked to pay additional taxes on money you don't actually have?) Sounds equal and fair to me!
Btw, I think it's good to note here that Obama is apparently only planning to return tax rates to what they were during the Clinton years.
Finally... well, I hesitate to say this, b/c I know it doesn't sound good, but... There's one sense in which all money that you make you wouldn't have made w/o the gov't, and so you're hardly being punished when the gov't says they're going to keep some portion of it. It doesn't mean you didn't work ridiculously hard for it, because maybe you did. But it does mean that, no matter how much of a self-made man you are (or think you are). . . You didn't pay for the roads your trucks take to deliver your product, and you didn't pay for the development of internet technology you use in sales and advertising, and you didn't pay for the creation of utilities systems that allowed your office buildings to have lights and running water, and you didn't pay for your employees to learn to read, etc. The government, in contrast, had a had in all of that. And all those things the gov't did helped YOU, financially, a lot more than they helped someone who doesn't own trucks or office buildings or hire other people's labor.
Dunno, just a thought.
Sarah Palin, secret socialist!
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2008/11/03/081103taco_talk_hertzberg
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