The Job Creators, Part II

Elizabeth Warren has been getting a lot of praise from the left for her remarks concerning the "class warfare" charges being made by conservatives against those who think that the top marginal tax rates should go back up.

It's about time someone on the left finally confronted the conservatives on this issue. Conservatives have been allowed to get away with saying all kinds of crap about the rich and taxes. The "class warfare" charge is a tactic designed to obfuscate the issue and tar Dems and libs as dirty fighters.

However, to my regret, Obama and others do make statements that make it easy to accuse them of using class warfare. By saying things like "the rich don't pay their fair share of taxes", it implies that the wealthy are responsible for writing the tax code. While it's true that some of them use their money to "persuade" politicians to give them all kinds of tax breaks and right wing billionaires like the Koch brothers are doing everything they can to reduce and eliminate taxes on the wealthy, ultimately it is the responsibility of Congress and the President to formulate the tax code. Besides, as we've seen, many wealthy people agree with a progressive tax code and think that in this time of dangerous mounting debt it's only fair and sensible for the wealthy to be paying more taxes. So the problem is tax policy not wealthy people.

So much of what the right says on this topic is truly outrageous but for now I will focus on what Ms. Warren had to say recently and the conservative reaction to it.

It seems as if this is the first time that someone with major media exposure has presented a counter to the right wing argument that the wealthy's money belongs to them, they owe nothing to society and government has no right to steal it from them.

Anyone who has read my blog posts or my emails for the past few years, dare I say, would have come across some pretty good arguments for a more progressive tax code.
And, if I may be so bold, I would suggest that if Ms. Warren had read my last post from August 21, "The Job Creators, Part I", she could have offered a much better response than the one she posed recently.
To tell you the truth, I think it was kinda weak.

Here's what she said:

"I hear all this, you know, 'Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever,'" Warren said. "No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody.

"You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.

"Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along."1


The first two sentences are completely, undeniably true.
But then the following sentences are full of all kinds of problems.

(A big problem that we have in this country, when it comes to debating issues, is a lack of precision in our language. Lack of precision in language leads to faulty reasoning and bad decisions. Conservatives take advantage of this imprecision to construct overly-simplistic arguments that seem plausible on the surface but are really seriously flawed.
And if liberals are not careful with their language they can be stumped by these arguments.)

Apparently speaking to some kind of a business-person, entrepreneur or investor, Ms. Warren says "You built a factory out there".
Wait a second Liz, you're falling for the right wing description of reality. The rich guy didn't build the factory. A bunch of other people built it for him.
It may have been an idea he had or gotten from someone else and he might have used his money or borrowed it from someone else or gotten someone else to invest in it for him in order to pay for the building of the factory, but that's a far cry from him actually building a factory himself, which is exactly what Warren's phraseology implies.

This is the kind of reasoning that lets people think that the rich "create jobs" and gives them more credit than they deserve. It also fails to give credit to the rest of us who contribute much more to the "creation of jobs".

And those people who actually, physically built the factory were only able to do so because they were supplied by a bunch of other people. And those people in turn had to rely on another bunch of people. And so on and so on. And let's not forget the contribution of the architects who designed the factory and the people who trained the architects and so on and so on.

The next mistake she makes is that she limits the contribution we all make to the economy, which gives the rich guy the opportunity to invest in various ways, to what we pay for in taxes through the government.
This gave Rush Limbag the opportunity to say "let's get rid of government so then we won't owe them anything".
I'll have more to say on that later.

We all contribute to the economy independently of the government, as well.

Next, after laying out her argument, which is as good as it goes, she mentions the "underlying social contract" and implies redistribution of wealth "for the next kid who comes along". Which is great. But what about the rest of us who created the economy that created that wealth?

Very importantly, I see that she is addressing her argument to the "rich guy", as if he's saying "you can't tax me because I'm a job creator!" Her argument should be addressed to the Republicans and the right wingers who are saying that, not the rich guy. She is falling into the "class warfare" trap, making this a fight between rich people and the rest of us. This can foster resentment towards rich people just for being rich. This is the wrong reason to base your argument on. It also allows the right to obfuscate the real issue and attack people like Ms. Warren.
Which is exactly what they've been been doing. They are actually playing her statements back to their audiences and using them, very effectively, to attack those of us who want to raise taxes.

Read my previous post. Our beef is with the right and tax policy not the rich. This is where the battleground belongs.