Welcome to the December Growth/No Growth issue of NorthBay biz magazine. This is one of the issues we especially enjoy producing each year, as it gives us a chance to shed some light on the always lively and controversial topic of growth in the North Bay. So please enjoy all the stories, special features and columns this month in the area’s only locally owned business publication—NorthBay biz.
Ready or not, it’s time for me to weigh in on the “occupy” movement that’s manifested itself locally in several North Bay cities, elsewhere in the state and around the country. Some pundits are making the case that the “occupy” protestors are nothing more than the left’s version of the “Tea Party” movement. That sounds like an apples and oranges comparison to me. The Tea Party arose as a reaction to the excesses of big government: profligate spending, unsustainable debt, high taxes, stifling regulations and wealth redistribution, the combined effects of which resulted in the worst economic downturn and job market since the Great Depression.
The “occupy” crowd seems to have been motivated into existence as a response to the progressive movement’s demand for retribution from the corporate world for the inequalities inherent in living life. Their rallying cries seem to always foment some sort of conflict—sexual, racial, ethnic or, in this case—class warfare. The “us against them crowd,” you know, the guardians whose self-appointed mission is to ferret out inequities (real or imagined) anywhere and everywhere in society, seem very confused when it comes to the concept of free speech. Free speech doesn’t confer the right to trample the rights of others or keep people from earning a living. And it certainly doesn’t mean free camping.
Railing against the injustice of having to pay back student loans or the unfairness of a proposed extra $5 monthly debit card charge doesn’t achieve liftoff velocity either when it comes to critical issues facing this country.
This incarnation of populist frenzy is also especially concerned with those of us not paying our “fair share” and creating unfair profits on the labors of the less fortunate. “Fat cat” bankers beware! Any president/CEO of a privately held company is fair game for their wrath. Look for protesters to be camping out on your front lawn if you run a business and are suspected of being a little too profitable.
However, it’s strange, these “occupy” forces don’t seem to be too concerned with public employee union bosses or Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac executives earning millions. It seems to matter little to them that the execs at Freddie Mac, for example, earned nearly $13 million in quarterly bonuses last year despite the loss of billions of taxpayer dollars. Apparently, it’s OK for execs to earn millions as long as it’s a taxpayer-subsidized business that’s losing billions.
Fueling the self-labeled “99 percenters” is an administration that’s ratcheted up its rhetoric lately, disparaging “billionaires, millionaires, fat cat bankers and corporate jet owners—making no distinction between small business owners working 60 hours per week to earn $200k per year and actual multi-millionaires. Painting all with the same brush is an effective strategy when establishing division. Over the past few decades, the federal tax scheme has become more progressive as the burden has shifted away from the vast middle to the upper quarter of income earners. Want proof? Last year, more than half of U.S. households paid no federal income tax at all. It’s reached the point where 30 percent of the households that paid no tax are instead making money through the Earned Income Tax Credit. How’s that for building a consensus where everyone has the same vested interest in seeing the country move in a direction that benefits everyone?
Pay your “fair share” is the unrelenting demand. The question is, who defines what’s fair? Right now, one-third of all income tax is paid by the top 1 percent of wage earners—the top 10 percent of earners pay 75 percent of all federal taxes. I guess that’s still not “fair” enough for this crowd of redistributionists.
Watching and listening to the “occupy” crowd’s fervor in explaining and justifying their positions, it becomes obvious that they’re pissed off because, even after paying a disproportionate share of taxes, the “rich” still have more money than they do. Back in the day, we used to call that emotion envy. Jealously of what others have earned and accomplished is a powerful emotion. Vilifying the people you envy, knocking them down a notch, is gratifying. Working hard and succeeding is somehow evil. You must have built your success on the backs of the poor. What a load of crap. How misguided and twisted do you have to be to let rampant envy color your world to this degree?
Victor Davis Hanson captured the essence of what defines class warfare today perfectly in a recent commentary he called Postmodern Class Warfare: “The battleground of class warfare has moved from the streets of yesteryear to the TV studio. And when we do see street violence—looting in Britain or flashmobbing in America—angry youths usually target high-end electronics stores and fashion outlets, not food markets or bookstores. They organize on social networks, not from soup kitchens, bread lines or basements.
“Class warfare is now not about brutal elemental poverty of the sort Charles Dickens wrote about. It is too often the anger that arises from not having something that somebody 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 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.”
That’s it for now. Enjoy this month’s magazine.
