NEW OpedNews Forums

Click Here to Access Hundreds of Fresh News & Opinion Articles

-Classics of Liberal Thinking

-archives of articles by our

  regular contributors

-Progressive Radio Links

-OpEdNews.Com Site Map

Voting against our economic self-interest

by Carl Schwensohn

OpEdNews.Com

 

 Last Thursday I listened to the stump speech President Bush delivered in   Blaine ,  Minnesota   . I was struck how carefully crafted it was, save for one discordance. He warned his audience to beware of Kerry's plan to provide more Americans with health care coverage because Kerry planned to pay for it by taxing the rich. He asserted to his audience that this was likely to boomerang, leaving them to pay the taxes because the rich don't want to pay taxes and they are good at using lawyers and accountants to avoid it. It did not go over with the loyalty-tested audience as well as the rest of the speech and he quickly moved on.

 

I think it made the audience uncomfortable because the very best tool the rich have for not paying taxes is getting politicians like George W Bush elected. This is accomplished by getting many Americans to vote against their own economic self-interest. This is not from altruism or a belief that Americans benefit inordinately from our position in the world, as these same folks enthusiastically rise to defend the economic self-interest of rich Americans whether it means dying in wars or polluting our planet.

 

A current Bush campaign commercial warns that small businesses could end up paying more taxes than "big multinational corporations." Of course, eighty-two of America ’s largest and most profitable corporations paid no federal income tax in at least one of the last three years, so this might raise the question of why they pay so little, but instead Bush encourages small business to pay less. As the sign in the gas station says, "If you're so smart why ain't you rich?" Obviously, the rich have got this tax thing figured out, so it won't work to try harder to tax them. We'll only end up paying the higher taxes instead, according to Bush's world view.

 

If the rich are always in tune their own economic self-interest, as Bush assures us, how are these folks tricked into ignoring their own?  For one thing they make it easy by misunderstanding their own interest. Almost forty percent of Americans have been found to believe either they are already in the top one percent of income earners in the country, or that they will be. They make it easy by not paying attention. Watching FNN turns out to actually make one less well-informed. Bush's audience probably thought that they were rich, which is why his suggesting that they weren't made them a bit uncomfortable, as they looked around at one another.

 

Most folks simply do not comprehend just how rich the really rich really are. As of 2000, the top one percent of income earners, 2.7 million people, receive 12.9 percent of national income, as much as the poorest 100 million people. One hundredth of the population receives as much income as the bottom third of the population, and it keeps getting more extreme. Statistics may cause your eyes to glaze over, but the average American's economic self-interest has more in common with the homeless than with the very rich. Not many Americans can survive a few months without a paycheck; very few of the very rich have ever earned a paycheck. The extreme imbalance between the very rich and the middle class in America is much worse than in any other industrialized nation and puts us more in the company of poor third world countries.

 

It is very important to George W. Bush that you do not recognize your own economic self-interest, not because acting in your own self-interest is wrong, but because recognizing it will wake you up to the fact that you are not in George W. Bush's base and that he is truly not acting in your economic self-interest. I called Bush's speech carefully crafted because, being well informed, I noticed how and why things were said the way they were. If you can't listen to the speech and understand what I mean, you could be better informed. Listen carefully, look at the numbers for yourself, and understand who is really making sacrifices.

 

Carl Schwensohn cschwensohn@netscape.net .  lives and works as a small business owner in urban    Minneapolis ,  Minnesota . A father of five, he laments the declining ability to think for one's self in America . This article is copyright by Carl Schwensohn. Permission is granted to forward this or to place it on a website as long as the article is included intact, including this statement.