Tim Lister
CNN Executive Editor
Why all this fuss about ‘redistribution?’ In the waning days of the election campaign, Senator McCain combined the word with socialism to condemn [now] President-elect Obama’s tax policies. It was always a crowd-pleaser with the faithful. The line of attack sprang from Obama’s legendary encounter with Joe the Plumber, when he said: “I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody.”
My friends and acquaintances back in Europe found it intriguing that a remark like this should be cause for controversy. Many a party and political career in Europe has been built on the principle of redistributing wealth. In Britain, the Labour Party’s constitution includes this vision of society: “a community in which power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the few.” And that’s the party of Blair and Brown, not exactly socialist firebrands. Even parties of the center-right in Europe embrace redistribution through progressive tax policies.
The English philosopher and godfather of the free market, Adam Smith, wrote in ‘The Wealth of Nations”: "It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue but something more than in that proportion." The year Smith finished his famous book, the American colonists mutinied against the British government’s plan to impose taxes on them, in effect a plan to redistribute their wealth to His Majesty’s Treasury. Maybe that’s the source of the very different attitudes toward redistribution.
But is it possible after the shocks of the last few months that attitudes toward the distribution of wealth are converging? When the redistribution flap began, CNN contributor David Gergen made this observation: “In 1979, 30 years ago versus today, the people in the bottom 80 percent are losing, compared to back then, $600 billion a year. The top one percent of the population is gaining compared to back then.”
On October 22nd, Senator McCain inveighed: “The redistribution of wealth is the last thing America needs right now. In these tough economic times, we don’t need government spreading the wealth, we need policies that create wealth and spread opportunity.”
On that same day, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, concluded that among its thirty members (most of the industrialized world) the United States had the highest rate of inequality – except for Mexico and Turkey. It noted that the distribution of earnings (the income gap between the top and bottom ten per cent) in the U.S. had widened 20 per cent since the mid 1980s, and that 23 per cent of the elderly were in poverty (versus 20 per cent in 1985.) This long-term trend has accelerated since 2000.
Combine that trend with the financial crunch and the popular backlash against “Masters of the Universe” on Wall Street, and maybe “spreading the wealth around” was a message that appealed to more Americans than the McCain campaign imagined.
| E.Adolphe |
November 19th, 2008 8:50 am ET I don't think that it is a redistribution but a sence of fairness, as far as the financial banking systems are concern it's had been a fraund on how the treat the middle class working people of America, the unregulated contracts, the first time home owners whom are left holding the empty bags. |
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| Larry L. |
November 19th, 2008 9:04 am ET Your "friends" Tim,are Socialist,and you maybe too,if you agree with them.Capitalism in our country drives the financial engines of the rest of the world,it is why we are the world leader in about everything.The problems we are having right now is because our politicians have allowed Socialism to creep in to our Capitalistic economics,and forced banks to loan money to people that were not credit worthy,and the government (Freddy,Fanny)"said" that backed the loans–they couldn't,so here we are-if we don't get off track,and let bad management fail,bite the bullet that Socialism has already caused,we'll be fine in time. |
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| Sandra |
November 19th, 2008 9:07 am ET Everyone wants redistribution of wealth.......as long as they are on the receiving end. How would the waitress feel if I told her she did a great job but I was going to give her tip to the homeless man outside who needs it more than she does? I bet she wouldn't like it then! |
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| Shah Riyahd |
November 19th, 2008 10:12 am ET Lets think about it another way. Had the money for the bailout been distributed to the working people of the U.S. surely we would be in a different state. Lets say $500,000 were awarded to every adult American citizen & 25,000 per child. we would still be saving money. People would pay off debts, buy cars, homes, finance there childrens educations, save for retirement, invest in the stock market, start new businesses or just spend it. Either way the economy wins. But we would also need legislation preventing price gouging so that values of items and property rise at a normal rate. The trickle down effect has evidently not worked, but the fact is that if we can afford to give Billions of dollars to the Greediest Americans who will do all they can to hord it, than we could have taken an approach that would benifit all Americans. |
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| Joanne, Syracuse, NY |
November 19th, 2008 10:25 am ET The issue of redistribution was born from the fact that great wealth, i.e. the greedy banks and the mortgage scam artists CEOs, were not fair, in the bailout, didn't have intention to give up bonus monies in the millions at the cost of those losing their homes, their jobs, and their dignity. This issue of redistribution became essential to the survival of the middle class. Free market society is what we all wanted, it didn't work. |
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| Sergei Daghlovsky |
November 19th, 2008 10:43 am ET Lets distinguish between short-term and long-term remedies. The market does not function fully efficiently – and we knew that since long time ago., so unfettered free market policies are obselete. Redistribution of our current assets is also completely naive but it is equally naive to treat the rich on the same terms as with the rest. Taxing the rich for now might work, but the Obama administration has to go beyond that to, in McCain's words, 'create wealth and spread opportunity' for the people who need them most because it's eventually going to be about the ability to sustain themselves in the long run. |
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| Terra Hoskins |
November 19th, 2008 10:47 am ET Well, is it a free market if the government keeps tinkering around with interest rates? In or out, but it's the hybrid of the two that isn't working. |
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| Rob Pulsipher |
November 19th, 2008 11:54 am ET The problem is covetousness on the part of the American people. This is what causes us to elect people who say they will spread the wealth around. However, once they get to office, what they really do is take money from everybody, and fund feel-good social programs, but all the while building in special interests for the powerful elites. (Think: Why are there lobbyists in Washington? Do you think they deal only with greedy, capitalist republicans? Or do they negotiate with democrats too?) So, everyone gets a token government handout, pays far more in taxes than they get out (with the exception of really poor, lazy, worthless people who don't pay anything in taxes), and lose our freedom in the process, all the while the very wealthy are sitting at the top, glutting themselves on the labor of the people. A buck cannot make a round trip to Washington without a bureaucratic bite being taken out! A large government is not transparent. A truly free market economy has a real, trickle down effect. A corrupt government creates a trickle up. You can't have a socialist government that isn't corrupt. That is the lesson we should have learned from the communists. Their whole system failed. It doesn't work! |
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| Rock, Sudbury, Ontario, Canada |
November 19th, 2008 12:00 pm ET ** Sandra.... your concept is cheesy AND full of holes! pardon the punn.... the system you mock has been in place for many years in many countries and the PEO is just tweeking the percentages! get the facts before you whine.... |
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| Arachnae |
November 19th, 2008 1:23 pm ET Lets say $500,000 were awarded to every adult American citizen & 25,000 per child. we would still be saving money. Where did people get this math? If you have 700 billion dollars to throw around, you can give half a million dollars to about 1.4 million people. There are 300 million+ people in the US. To give all of them a half-million would cost fourteen TRILLION dollars. That's the size of the entire US economy. |
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| Jeremy Sawyer |
November 19th, 2008 3:49 pm ET Lets say $500,000 were awarded to every adult American citizen & 25,000 per child. we would still be saving money. axctually the program your talking about is to only people who have paid their taxes for the past 5 years and are over 18,which constitutes to about a third of our country.and it was only 200,000$.people need to actually state facts and not what they heard. |
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