LITTLE ROCK — With the expected Democratic Party electoral drubbing only about six weeks away, it is strange but perhaps predictable to hear the Obama administration claim that the rich aren’t paying “their fair share.”
According to the latest official government figures, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans pays more in income taxes than the bottom 95 percent combined. The bottom 40 percent in income pays virtually no income tax. This is the most dramatically skewed tax burden in the history of the republic.
If this isn’t the rich paying their “fair share,” what in Barack Obama’s view would fair share consist of?
He and fellow liberals apparently believe that Americans will always embrace the idea of soaking the rich, especially if they are allowed individually to somehow avoid being placed in that highly elastic category.
The idea of letting an ever-increasing number of Americans off of the tax hook while loading the burden on an ever-smaller number of supposedly rich fellow citizens represents political corruption in its most craven form. Such vulgar populism stokes class resentments and undermines both justice and notions of civic responsibility. It also likely will backfire for the simple reason that, unlike Obama, most Americans see wealth and success as the consequences of hard work and ability rather than accidents of nature.
Most families with incomes of at least $250,000 have mothers and fathers who took risks to start small businesses, studied hard in school tobuild careers and delayed gratification in life while others around them made bad decisions and squandered opportunities. They and the nation deserve better than a president who thinks they got where they did by “winning the lottery of life.” To be successful in the November elections, every Republican candidate across the land should seek to “nationalize” his race by making it a referendum on Obama.
Every television commercial run should feature a picture of his opponent with the triumvirate of Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi hovering eerily in the background. In debates, GOP candidates should begin every response with the line, “My liberal opponent, who supports the Obama agenda.”
When Republicans run as conservatives and successfully paint their foes as liberal, they almost always win. When they let their opponents muddy the ideological waters, they almost always lose. What this means is that Republicans have only themselves to blame if they can’t win in a state like Arkansas that John McCaincarried by 20 points.
Consistent with this, the GOP should make clear that the concept of a “conservative” Democrat is a myth on a par with the Loch Ness monster and Bigfoot. Indeed, the only difference between a liberal Democrat and an alleged conservative Democrat is that the former vote with Obama, Pelosi and company all the time, the latter just 90 percent of the time.
Blanche Lincoln can try to sell herself as a born-again conservative as re-election rolls around, but the local yokels finally seem to be catching on to the game that has been played at their expense.
What Samuel Huntington called the third wave of global democratization began in the mid-1970s with the belated demise of the Franco and Salazar dictatorships in Spain and Portugal. In the years since then, the percentage of the world’s countries that have moved toward some form of multiparty democracy has increased from about 25 percent to nearly 70 percent.
All the more remarkable, then, that Muslim countries constitute the overwhelming majority of the world’s 60 or so remaining dictatorships.
According to Freedom House, of the 57 Muslim-majority members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, only six (Benin, Mali, Guyana, Senegal, Suriname and Indonesia) are considered free in the sense of providing basic political and human rights.
The central problem of world politics is that wherever we find Islam, we don’t find much democracy, and wherever we find democracy, we don’t find much Islam. This is the elephant in the room that political correctness tells us to ignore.
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Free-lance columnist Bradley R. Gitz lives and teaches in Batesville.
Editorial, Pages 85 on 09/26/2010