Insert my requisite apology for failing to post here, but since no one really follows this blog, it's probably not a big deal anyway.
Yesterday, Senate Minority Whip John Kyl (R-Ariz.) made an impassioned speech insisting that President Obama's focus on the middle class is "misguided and wrong and even dangerous." Kyl went on to claim that the narrative of "middle-class values" and "ordinary Americans" improperly vilifies prosperity, and wealth Americans. Cue the sports analogy (in Kyl's exact words):
When Michael Jordan came, after he established how great he would be, he was given an enormous, almost unheard of salary. Did the other players say, 'That's not fair?' No, actually all the other players got big salary increases, too. The whole franchise did well, the people selling popcorn, the people parking the cars ... made more money than they ever would have had Michael Jordan never came to the team.
This is such an impossibly, disastrously faulty analogy that I don't even know where to start. First of all, the world of professional sports is a tiny, brutal little microcosm where only the spectacular succeed and the mediocre are left for dead. How does this at ALL reflect the real world? And more importantly, should we really be holding that up as an example to which our society must model itself?
But the more problematic undertone of this speech is that wealth has a tendency to equalize: that we ALL become more prosperous when the wealthy becomes more prosperous. That the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy (the subject of this speech) should be extended, because tax cuts are great, right? Tax cuts make us all more equal, right? Oh, wait...
To put things in perspective, here's a list of countries that have MORE equality than America (I've used the World Bank's Gini coefficient):
* Reference -- the US is at 0.41
1. The United Kingdom - 0.36 (yes, even with royalty and nobility still happening there, apparently there's still more equality than in America)
4. Egypt -- 0.32 (and we all know what happened there...)
5. Syria -- 0.36 (and there.)
Just look at these numbers: our nation is so clearly unequal. It shocks me to think that there are people like Kyl out there running our government--people who think that not only is this kind of inequality okay, but it's something to aspire to. I, for one, despise this insistence that we stop admiring the ordinary, middle-class American and start revering the wealthy. That shouldn't be how this country works.
