LIE 4
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PROGRESSIVES OPPOSE INCOME INEQUALITY
The dream of upward mobility that made this country a model for the world feels further and further out of reach and many Americans understandably feel frustrated, even angry. . . . Some are calling it a throwback to the Gilded Age of the robber barons.
—HILLARY CLINTON, NEW AMERICA FOUNDATION, 2014
To my mind, if you have seen a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class to the top one-tenth of one percent, you know what, we’ve got to transfer that back if we’re going to have a vibrant middle class.
—BERNIE SANDERS, 2016 CAMPAIGN
THE LIE
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Hillary Clinton says that “income inequality” is one of the “biggest issues we face.” She wants to “reshuffle the deck” to address the issue. Bernie Sanders railed against both “income inequality” and “wealth inequality” during his campaign for president. Liberal outlets such as the New York Times routinely publish columns and editorials discussing the need to act urgently in the crisis.
Behind these sob stories is a pervasive fear. Some rich guy somewhere is taking more than his fair share. He’s cheating you. He’s using you. Only by giving power to progressives will these nefarious profit seekers be stopped. Only through progressivism will income distribution be balanced.
THE TRUTH
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Rich liberals have no real interest in fixing “income inequality”—at least as it applies to their own income. Take Michael Moore, the socialist filmmaker who loves to rail against the evil millionaires in high-rises in New York who are looking down on the Everyman. While leading the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, Moore pretended to be a working-class hero, just like the demonstrators. When Piers Morgan asked Moore on national television about being part of the “one percent,” Moore feigned shock and flat-out lied, responding, “Of course I’m not. How can I be in the one percent?” But independent analysts have estimated Moore’s worth at around $50 million. In 2012, the cutoff for the “one percent” in America was a net worth of $20 million.
In other words, Moore lied. But why? Because even he recognizes the absurdity of a multimillionaire telling a working family that they aren’t paying enough taxes. Because Moore is, in fact, the aloof millionaire looking down on poor people, just like the imaginary enemies he rails against.
Moore isn’t the only millionaire entertainer who wants to make sure a wise progressive government makes decisions for us. Just look at some of the unbelievably wealthy celebrities who, along with Moore, supported Sanders in 2016:
• Singer Neil Young, with a net worth of $65 million, supported Sanders and let him use his music at rallies.
• Actors Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, while no longer a Hollywood power couple, threw their weight separately behind the democratic socialist and still have a combined net worth of more than $100 million.
• Dick Van Dyke, who has amassed a net worth of $30 million during several decades on the stage and screen, specifically said he supported Sanders because he reminded him of a “New Deal Democrat” from the Franklin Roosevelt era. As we show in this book, Van Dyke is more right than even he probably knows.
You might further think it strange that Clinton, who made $3 million for giving three speeches in 2013, is telling the rest of us to fork over more money to the government. But it’s not strange. It’s predictable. Because none of this is really about helping the poor. It is about control.
What exactly does the phrase income inequality even mean? To take a literal definition, it’s the fact that some people earn more money than others, something that obviously can’t be prevented unless all salaries are set by the state. No modern-day progressives will go that far—at least not yet—so what they’ve said they really mean is that they want to narrow the gap between the rich and the poor in America. But that is a lie, too. Progressives don’t have a realistic plan to make the poor richer. That would involve encouraging independence, entrepreneurship, ambition—all qualities the Left deplores. All they really do know is how to make everyone else poorer. Except, of course, themselves. Do as I say, not as I do.
Their preferred way to do that is through massive tax increases. Sanders, who is among the most extreme of the lot, advocated an astounding $19 trillion in new taxes. His supporters called it the “Robin Hood tax,” because they claimed it would take from the rich and give to the poor.
Another tactic is a relentless increase in the minimum wage, which really benefits teenagers and punishes struggling workers. Wealthy liberals love this idea, pretending that it’s an easy way to help the poor. Their logic says that if you set a minimum wage that’s above the poverty level, then no one can be in poverty. That’s another lie.
Since 1980, the federal minimum wage has been increased nine times. Yet according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the percentage of Americans who fall below the poverty level is now sixteen percent—a three percent increase since 1980, despite those nine minimum-wage hikes.
The truth is that raising the minimum wage actually has the opposite effect on poverty from what progressives would like everyone to believe. Rising minimum wages mean higher unemployment. A study conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco found that minimum-wage increases may have cost the economy as many as two hundred thousand jobs.
Those jobs are mostly entry-level. They are low-skill and do not usually require much experience. But they are important because they help new workers develop skills and climb up to the next rung on the ladder. These are the jobs the poor need the most—the alternative is welfare—but wealthy liberals want to make them more expensive for employers. So businesses, at least the ones interested in profits, eliminate positions, cut hours, outsource the jobs, or replace them with automation or computers.
If they can’t do any of that and are instead forced to pay workers more, do you think they just eat the cost? Of course not. They simply charge more for their products. They pass the cost on to their customers, rich and poor alike. So the price of milk goes up sixty cents a gallon, the price of toothpaste goes up twenty-five cents, and so on. It adds up. And soon the cost overtakes the “raise” that a low-income worker received as part of the minimum-wage hike. Clinton, Sanders, and Moore can absorb that increased cost of living just fine. Do you know who gets hurt? Those who live paycheck to paycheck or have a kitchen-table budget. It’s the poor and the middle class who suffer. And it’s been proven time and time again.
A third favorite tactic to address “income disparity” is proposing a universal basic income, which, in reality, is money that working people pay to everyone else on an annual basis, regardless of what they contribute to society. Progressives say that if you replace all welfare programs with a fixed level of income, you will cure poverty (in Switzerland, they’ve proposed $2,700 a month). It’s a somewhat new idea, and even some conservatives have gotten on board.
Simply handing out a couple of grand a month to every downtrodden citizen in America would be prohibitively expensive. The Swiss proposal would cost around $210 billion annually, or an astounding thirty percent of Switzerland’s GDP. Some estimates show that a guaranteed basic income in the United States would cost Americans upward of $3 trillion a year. It would take Sanders’ levels of taxation to pay for this massive redistribution. And it’s not Clinton and Moore who would be paying for it. Millions of working Americans would pay for millions of nonworking Americans.
It’s a direct transfer of wealth, so let’s call it what it really is: socialism.
Socialism is the idea that the inherent unfairness of life can be regulated and altered by government to make everyone equal. There have been some historical examples of this succeeding—but not in the way it was promised. In places like the former Soviet Union, North Korea, or Cuba, socialism has instituted fairness by making everyone equally miserable and destitute.
It reminds me of a great line from P. J. O’Rourke. About traveling to th
e Soviet Union with a group of Communists, he wrote, “These were people who believed everything about the Soviet Union was perfect, but they were bringing their own toilet paper.” You have to ask yourself, if liberals truly cared about income inequality, why do they want to make being poor more expensive?
There’s also a social aspect to minimum wages and guaranteed incomes. Benjamin Franklin talked about it in 1766, and it’s amazing how well the wisdom of the Founding Fathers holds up today. Franklin wrote:
I am for doing good to the poor, but . . . I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. I observed . . . that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.
We value work in this country. What I find deplorable about the idea of a universal basic income is that it robs people of the pursuit of happiness. It makes them satisfied with mediocrity. It makes them comfortable with not aspiring to do great things or give back to the country.
Arthur Brooks, who runs the conservative American Enterprise Institute, suggests that policies like these are robbing people not only of their dreams but also of their happiness. According to Brooks, choosing to pursue the four key virtues of faith, family, community, and work is an important part of one’s happiness. It takes, as you might imagine, a little bit of discipline.
The first three virtues are self-explanatory, not controversial. The last is work. I think it’s the most important element, and I think it should be as uncontroversial as the others. Ronald Reagan said there is “dignity” in work. Is there anything more rotten than depriving someone of his or her dignity?
Not all jobs are fun. Not all work is enjoyable. But that’s not why we toil. Happiness lies in the things that are hard. There is joy in accomplishment. There is passion and excitement in creativity. Hard work is a vehicle for those virtues.
Again, what lies at the root of the progressive obsession with wealth and attacking those who have it (even when they are wealthy themselves) is fear. The fear of one day being poor. The fear of failure and of being alone with no one to support them. These giant safety-net programs and guaranteed incomes and high minimum wages are for them in case they ever need it. They don’t have confidence in themselves, and they don’t have confidence in their communities and their families to help if illness strikes or they lose their fortunes. And so they turn to the government.
We should all reject redistributive philosophy, not only on economic and patriotic grounds but also on moral ones. People cannot be pulled out of poverty, they can only climb out of it themselves. We can all be there to lend a helping hand and a lot of encouragement, but the moment we try to eliminate the poor through federal policy, the whole system collapses.
And maybe that’s exactly the way they want it.
LIE 5
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THE REPUBLICAN PARTY OPPOSES PROGRESSIVISM
What is at stake is more than one small country; it is a big idea: a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind.
—GEORGE H. W. BUSH, 1991
I’m a George W. Bush conservative.
—GEORGE W. BUSH, 2008
THE LIE
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We’ve seen how the Democratic Party has been hijacked by progressives. They’ve been very effective in enacting their agenda, but they couldn’t have done it alone. They would never have been so successful if an opposition party was united and determined in its efforts to stop them, whatever the costs.
For decades now, we’ve heard from Republican leaders that we need to elect them to pursue conservative priorities. They are the ones who tell us they’re the stalwart defenders of the Constitution against big-government Democrats. When Republicans were swept into the congressional majority by the Tea Party wave of 2010, the first thing new Speaker John Boehner did was to read the Constitution to the House Chamber. Mitch McConnell always talks about his “fidelity to the Constitution.” Come election time, every Republican talks about his or her deep, abiding love for our nation’s founding documents and his or her desire to thwart the progressive agenda.
I once believed that. I think most of us did. We knew the Left lied to us regularly. What we didn’t know was that the Republicans were doing the same thing. They ask for our votes, promise to stand against the progressive agenda of Obama, Clinton, Reid, and Pelosi, and then they go to Washington only to enact it or, at best, make compromises on the margins. We just didn’t have the votes to stop it, they tell us.
Almost all of these Republicans got into office because of our support. We believed in them. We campaigned for them and fought for them and voted for them. And yet we’ve ended up disappointed. The progressive agenda is more successful than it’s ever been. Conservatives have lost ground in the culture war and the policy war.
How did it happen? Because Republicans—not all but many, and certainly the most influential—are advocates of progressivism, too.
THE TRUTH
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The first president who actually enacted progressive policies and embraced the antidemocratic, antibusiness rhetoric of the progressive movement wasn’t a Democrat. He was a Republican, one of the most popular in American history: Theodore Roosevelt. He is still lionized in certain Republican circles (like Bill Kristol’s Weekly Standard) and other so-called neoconservative outposts that embrace TR’s big-government philosophy.
Roosevelt was so zealous about creating a Washington, D.C.–based empire that he destroyed the Republican Party in 1912 to do it, running a mad, quixotic campaign against his former friend, William Howard Taft, that guaranteed the election of Woodrow Wilson.
But Teddy Roosevelt Republicanism—the kind that truly believes in a big government to solve all of our problems—never went away. Government continued to grow, and even so-called conservative politicians got used to the expansion of their own powers that grew along with it. After all, no matter what their party label, some people are just drawn to being career politicians because of the power and control that come with the position. Thus, the acceptance, and even furtherance, of big government remained the prevailing view of the GOP throughout the Eisenhower and Nixon eras and during the advent of the so-called Rockefeller Republicans of the 1970s.
Progressive Republicans hated the candidacy of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Reagan didn’t just dislike their philosophy, he utterly repudiated it. That was why establishment Republicans at the time depicted Reagan as a senile fool or a dangerous loose cannon. As soon as he was out of office, the Republican Party was back at its big government tricks again.
George H. W. Bush implicitly criticized the guy who got him elected—Reagan—by calling for a “kinder, gentler” nation. We soon learned that this was actually code for being kinder and gentler to the nation’s lobbyists. The first Bush raised taxes after promising not to, increased the size of the federal government, expanded burdensome environmental regulations on small businesses, and put one of the most liberal justices of the twentieth century, David Souter, on the Supreme Court.
Worrying about his reelection chances, Bush 41 delighted in supporting and helping to enact the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). This is another in a long line of those wonderful-sounding programs—who doesn’t want to help the disabled?—that turned into a massive waste of taxpayer dollars and an excuse to greatly expand the federal government.
One problem with the ADA was that it broadly defined disability to mean basically, well, anything: “a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more of the major life activities.” Within two decades, according to at least one report on the law, Congress expanded that definition to include diabetics, the depressed, and people having “significant” trouble “standing, sitting, reaching, lifting, bending, reading, concentrating, thin
king, communicating and interacting with others.” As a result, the ADA became known as “Attorneys’ Dreams Answered” because it led to thousands, hundreds of thousands, of lawsuits against private industries. A few examples:
• In California, a P.F. Chang’s restaurant was sued under the law because the coat hook on the door of a toilet stall was at an improper height.
• Using the ADA, the federal government sued United Parcel Service for its refusal to hire one-eyed drivers for its big trucks, even though UPS argued that such a hire would endanger “the health or safety of others to a greater extent that if an individual without a disability performed the job.”
• One wheelchair-bound convicted child molester who lived in Arizona was said to take regular trips to California just to file nuisance lawsuits against businesses under the ADA.
Again, these suits, and thousands like them, occurred as a result of the actions of a Republican administration. Unfortunately, the next Bush administration didn’t do any better.
With the full support of many Republicans in Congress, George W. Bush’s administration passed Medicare Part D, a brand-new prescription-drug entitlement program that significantly expanded the federal government, not to mention the country’s deficit. The administration also supported a taxpayer bailout of the bad decisions of Wall Street, under TARP, which was capped off by the bizarre, Orwellian pronouncement by the president that he had “abandoned free-market principles to save the free market.”
I’ve heard from Republicans who were in the room during some of the debates over TARP. What they saw were Mafia tactics; people had to commit to the bill before they could leave the room. They were told they would be personally responsible for the downfall of civilization if the government didn’t hand billions to Wall Street, without any real plan or accountability.