Tax the rich—whoever they are

posted at 11:38 am on February 24, 2012 by Howard Portnoy

President Obama’s divisive reelection campaign theme—tax the rich and redistribute the wealth—has a new spokesperson: his wife. Michelle Obama picked up on the class warfare theme at a fundraising event in Cincinnati on Thursday.

She asked a rhetorical question of those in attendance, some of whom paid $10,000 to attend: “Who do we want to be? Will we be a country where success is limited to the few at the top?”

She also made this statement: “If a family in this country is struggling, we cannot be satisfied with our own families’ good fortune.”

Taken together, the remarks call to mind the Kuder Preference Test, a survey given to elementary school students back in the 1950s that was purportedly designed to assess vocational inclinations. The questions on the survey were heavily weighted toward a correct (read: most humane) answer (i.e., Would you rather read to a sick friend or play baseball?), which resulted in almost everyone learning that his ideal career was social work.

The same may be said of the First Lady’s purposefully simplistic remarks. Take her statement first, rephrasing it as a question: If a family in this country is struggling, can you be satisfied with your own family’s good fortune? The adult answer is, it depends on a number of variables. Is the struggling family young and just starting out, in which case some degree of struggle is typical? Do we lump all struggling families together or do we discriminate between those that, for example, squander whatever money comes there way on trifles and those that have been dealt a bad hand? And in any case do we want the government leveling the playing field for us or do we want to choose to take care of our needier brothers and sisters through individual acts of charity and good works?

And then there is the question of what constitutes good fortune? (It is certainly something the First Lady knows a good bit about, having lived life large since moving to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.) If the solution to “economic fairness” is to take more from the wealthy and return it to the government pool, then we need to establish who the wealthy are.

It is issue that is unsettled in the mind of Mrs. Obama’s husband. It is only recently that he redefined wealth to apply to those with an adjusted gross income of $1 million or more. Prior to that, the cutoff was $250,000 per couple. (Judging from his State of the Union address in January, there is a nebulous undefined class of earners between those two extremes whose fate as taxpayers is yet to be determined.)

The notion of what constitutes wealth is also unsettled in the minds of Americans. A Gallup poll conducted at the end of 2011, asked 1,012 adults 18 and older, “Just thinking about your own situation, how much money per year would you need to make to consider yourself rich?” The question was open-ended. Perhaps surprisingly, only 4% cited an amount above $1 million. Another 11% identified $1 million even as the threshold. The range with the largest percentage of respondents, 23%, was $100,000 to $150,000. The median was $150,000.

Maybe it would be instructive for the president to take the Kuder Preference Test. If he did and his true calling was community organizer, do you think it would surprise him?

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