William McGurn, in a brief but splendid article in The Wall Street Journal yesterday, helps us to understand the way that moralism plays out in Obama’s policy prescriptions. The key term, McGurn notes, is “fairness,” a loaded word that Obama (like many liberals) deploys as a moral bludgeon. Consider the issue of taxes. At Saddleback Church in Southern California the other day, one of the issues Rick Warren asked McCain and Obama about was taxes. “Define rich,” he asked. “I mean give me a number. Is it $50,000, $100,000, $200,000? Everybody keeps talking about who we’re going to tax. How can you define that?” Some on the Left have pilloried McCain for saying that he considered an income of $5 million a year “rich,” but the gravamen of McCain’s response, as McGurn points out, came in his elaboration: “I don’t want to take any money from the rich. I want everybody to get rich.”
How different was Obama’s response. What he was looking for, he said, was “a sense of balance, and fairness in our tax code. It is time for folks like me who make more than $250,000 to pay our fair share.”
“Our fair share.” That is the Obama refrain. “[W]e will save Social Security for future generations by asking the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share.” It’s a small step from the invocation of “our fair share” to Obama’s call for a tax on “the windfall profits of oil companies,” a tax increase on capitals gains, elimination of the tax on Social Security tax, etc., etc.
The crucial point here is that what Obama is interested in is not increasing but in promulgating redistributionist policies that make it harder for people to prosper economically. McGurn recalls Obama’s response to ABC’s Charlie Gibson when Gibson observed that rasing taxes led to decreased revenues: “Well, Charlie,” Obama replied, “what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.”
“For purposes of fairness”: that means, “for purposes of economic egalitarianism.” McGurn comments:
[I]t doesn’t really matter whether a tax increase actually brings in more revenue. It’s not about robbing from the rich to give to the poor. Robbing from the rich will do, especially if it’s done in the name of fairness.
Now there are good reasons Mr. Obama is not likely to pursue the revenue side of the fairness question. As this newspaper noted in a recent editorial, the latest data from the Internal Revenue Service does not show to Mr. Obama’s advantage. As we come to the end of the Bush administration, the top 1% of American taxpayers already pay 40% of all income taxes — the highest level in 40 years. The top 10% of income earners pay 71% of the taxes.
The bottom line is that when Obama invokes “fairness,” he wants us to feel guilty about economic success. This is the secret of his appeal to to socialistically inclined. It is also the reason why the rest of us are so uneasy about the prospect of an Obama administration.