President Obama is in a populist frenzy against “Them,” who supposedly “are not paying their fair share.” But 21st century class warfare is a weird thing.
Take the technology that gives most what only the few once could afford. Most Americans now expect as a birthright iPhones, iPods, DVDs and big-screen TVs. The typical welfare recipient now owns a sophisticated cellphone; a fat cat corporate CEO not long ago did not.
For the president, riding on a private jet from New York to Los Angeles is supposed to be privilege. But a poor person on a discount nonstop ticket can still get there as safely and almost as quickly for about one-thousandth of the cost in fuel and overhead. Once they land minutes apart at LAX, was the Gulfstream passenger all that blessed, the guy in steerage with headphones and a TV screen all that deprived?
The president believes that those who make more than $200,000 are synonymous with millionaires. But such income levels are not good barometers of wealth in a world where graduated taxes can eat up to 50 percent of a salary, and high-income areas have sky-high housing costs. Some of the less-well-off go to school for near free on scholarship packages to state universities. Other students pay $200,000 for a four-year private college — sometimes for the prestige of the degree rather than any quantifiably better education.
Nor do we talk about off-the-books labor, where millions earn money without reporting either income or sales receipts — and often while on state subsidies.
In the old days, class warriors were proverbial men of the people who made an effort to match their lifestyles with their rhetoric. Not now. When President Obama rails about “millionaires,” we expect that in a few hours our Class Warrior in Chief will golf with Wall Street fat cats to hit them up for campaign money. We presume that the First Family prefers Costa del Sol, Martha’s Vineyard or Vail to a passé Camp David.
If director Michael Moore or Mayor Bloomberg warns us about impending class strife, we assume both live in huge homes and are multimillionaires.
The new class-warfare coalitions are comprised mostly of the less well off and the very well off, one wishing for ever more state help, the other rich enough to not mind bestowing it. No wonder both demonize those in the middle who are most likely to feel the cost of ever more government. The battleground of class warfare has moved from the streets to the TV studio green room or the seaside hotel retreat.
And when we really do see street violence — looting in Britain or flash-mobbing in America — angry youths usually target high-end electronics stores and fashion outlets, not food markets or bookstores. They organize on social networks from their laptops and cellphones, not from soup kitchens, bread lines or dank basements.
Class warfare is now not about brutal elemental poverty of the sort Charles Dickens once wrote about. It is too often the anger that arises from not having something that someone else has, whether or not such style, privilege or discretionary choices are all that necessary.
Endemic obesity, not malnutrition, threatens America — including the nearly 50 million Americans who are on food stamps.
These are hard times, with high unemployment rates and economic stagnation. But we are not a nation of the malnourished and starving who are preyed upon by idle rich drones who pay no taxes. And a government that borrows $4 billion a day and spends $2 trillion more a year than it did just 10 years ago is hardly stingy.