Common good; common misery

The Wall Street Journal’s Steven McKinnon has discovered the Democrats’ rallying cry for this election season;

The latest tussle in the world of political rhetoric is pitting Aristotle and Augustine against political pollsters and a raft of Democratic presidential candidates.

At stake is the notion of “common good,” which many Democrats are embracing as a new framework for expressing their vision of broader opportunity and equality.

We heard it three years ago when Hillary Clinton warned some her more ignorant rich supporters in San Francisco that she planned on taking their stuff “for the common good”. It worked so good then that, I guess they plan on using it as a theme. And true to his character, Eugene Robinson, DNC’s partisan hack columnist at the Washington Post parrots the party line today;

The picture that emerges from all the quintiles, correlations and percentages is of a nation in which, overall, “the current generation of adults is better off than the previous one,” as one of the studies notes. The median income of the families studied was $55,600 in the late 1960s; their children’s median family income was $71,900. However, this rising tide has not lifted all boats equally. The rich have seen far greater income gains than have the poor.

Even more troubling is that our notion of America as the land of opportunity gets little support from the data. Americans move fairly easily up and down the middle rungs of the ladder, but there is “stickiness at the ends” — four out of 10 children who are born poor will remain poor, and four out of 10 children who are born rich will stay rich.

So, who exactly are these rich people who are holding the poor down, counter to the “common good”? Well, according to the Washington Times’ Donald Lambro, they’re Democrats;

Democrats like to define themselves as the party of poor and middle-income Americans, but a new study says they now represent the majority of the nation’s wealthiest congressional districts.

In a state-by-state, district-by-district comparison of wealth concentrations based on Internal Revenue Service income data, Michael Franc, vice president of government relations at the Heritage Foundation, found that the majority of the nation’s wealthiest congressional jurisdictions were represented by Democrats.

He also found that more than half of the wealthiest households were concentrated in the 18 states where Democrats hold both Senate seats.

“If you take the wealthiest one-third of the 435 congressional districts, we found that the Democrats represent about 58 percent of those jurisdictions,” Mr. Franc said.

A key measure of each district’s wealth was the number of single-filer taxpayers earning more than $100,000 a year and married couples filing jointly who earn more than $200,000 annually, he said.

Now, far be it from me, an avowed Conservative for more than thirty years, to disparage people for having as much or more money than I have, but one has to wonder why people who’ve sacrificed and worked hard their whole lives would turn on their neighbors and require even more sacrifice and hard work for less reward for a tired old marxist term like “for the common good”.

Well, it’s not that hard to figure out really. Democrats have always been exclusive – remember they’re the party of slavery, they’re the party of segregation. They’ve always had veneer of concern for the downtrodden while protecting their own particular status. They’re mighty good actors, too. Franklin Roosevelt, John Kerry, Al Gore, Jay Rockefeller, Ted Kennedy all millionaires in their own right, disparaged other millionaires and threatened to confiscate their earnings “for the common good” with some measure of success. But if you compare their actions with their deeds, the hypocrisy shines through.

Take Hillary for example. We all know the stories in the 1992 campaign about her trying to write off her husband’s underwear on their tax returns to save a few pennies from the tax collector. Does that sound like someone who is willing to pay higher taxes “for the common good”? Remember Al Gore’s 1999 tax returns when his charitable giving amounted to the cost of a low fat mocca-java and a muffin at Starbucks.

Remember John Kerry and Ted Kennedy fighting against the wind farm being erected off the coast of their mansions because it’d spoil their ocean vistas. Arguably, the wind farm would’ve benefitted the people of Massachusetts with low cost renewable energy, but it was sacrificed for the asthetics of a very few rich. Where was “the common good” factored in to that decision?

Democrats measure the common good by common misery, though. It’s not enough that the poor have housing, healthcare, food and clothing – the working Americans have to actually do without their luxuries in order for Democrats to feel they’re doing something worthwhile. Bill Clinton raised taxes on married couples, called the “marriage-penalty tax” by Republicans. His reasoning was that they weren’t paying their fair share because most married couples, at the time, had only one working spouse while the other stayed home to care for kids, but they were getting a tax break equal to two workers. Make sense? Me neither.

Bill Clinton raised taxes on retirees receiving Social Security by raising the taxable amount of the benefit to 85%. It had been 50% prior to the 1993 tax hike, because the money that you pay into Social Security is taxed when you earned it. But because of his facade of caring for the poor and downtrodden, AARP and retirees ignored the huge tax grab. Just like his facade of caring about the race issue – but not actually accomplishing anything yet he’s still being praised by “Black leaders” today. For having done nothing.

Democrats feel better about themselves when they support tax hikes because they feel like they’re “giving” to the poor, but historically, their volunteer contributions to the poor are low. They say things like “Jesus would be a Democrat”, when actually, Jesus was talking to the people, not governments, and encouraging people to be charitable and caring. Government, by it’s very nature is neither charitable nor caring. I’m pretty sure that even Jesus would be somewhat angry at the comparison.

So, I know when a Democrat tells me that he wants my money “for the common good”, he really means he wants me to be more miserable so he can feel better about himself.

Category: Politics, Society