As a student who has specific goals of not taking advantage of systemic inequality to further my own pursuit of wealth, I found last Tuesday’s article, “Forget Costs: A Democratic Debate Summary”, distasteful.
In Michael Froedge’s world, all taxes are a form of theft and every one percenter is simply an astute go-getter. Bernie Sanders thinks money grows on trees, and Hillary Clinton wants everyone to work for the government. As I read Froedge’s article, I quickly recognized an inherent weakness grounded in his modern conservatism: a blatant rejection of reality.
Two major themes were conveyed:
First, misconstrue, briefly mention and define scarcity with no relevance to the actual argument. In economics, scarcity can be adequately defined as “the conflict between unlimited wants and limited resources.” Under this conceptual framework, societies must make economic decisions to allocate resources efficiently. For Froedgian economic scholars, this is somehow meant to imply the rich must be allowed to allocate all resources to themselves. Modern progressives who wish to help the destitute buy their groceries are dangerously distorting market and social processes. The modern conservatives, however, are keeping the free market strong by allowing the ultra wealthy to recklessly invest while simultaneously starving the working class of upward mobility and fair wages.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Bernie Sanders’s proposed economic plan would increase federal spending by more than $18 trillion over the next ten years. The purposefully misrepresented spending package will benefit the average American by providing an anticipated single-payer health care system, an expansion of Social Security and a massive taxpayer-funded infrastructure program. Despite the social, economic and political advantages of such policies, Froedge continues to focus on fear mongering, ignoring the human costs of his own economic ideology.
The second major theme: the gross admiration of America’s wealthiest people. “It is immoral and wrong that 57 percent of income growth is going to the top one percent,” says Bernie Sanders. Froedge diminishes the complexity of the American government and its taxation structure to a medium that exists solely for “confiscating” money from the upper class. Apparently all taxes on the rich are then handed directly to the greedy poor, without any benefits to the wealthy or society in general, like infrastructure, law enforcement, foreign defense, etc.
To anyone who read Froedge’s article, it should be apparent that this piece attempts to mimic and mock the structure and wording that Froedge employs. This was difficult because the article’s reasoning was so flawed. To complete my argument, I’d like to make a few short points:
Despite the title of “A Debate Summary,” there is very little debate commentary: it’s simply a platform to spew far-right economic policy. In this ideology, there is equal economic opportunity for all hardworking citizens, which is not true in our country. Citizens who grow up in poor areas go to poor schools, since schools are funded by property taxes, and since “80 percent of jobs are found by networking,” people without connections simply do not have the same opportunities. There is also a fundamental error in assuming the wealthiest Americans have earned their wealth, and liberals are big meanies to saying otherwise. But most of this wealth is not in the form of salary: it’s literally called “unearned income,” which is income from inheritances, dividends, interest and rent. The portrayal of the wealthiest people in the world as victims of the covetous masses is particularly disgusting when the affluent's refusal to pay fair wages is the reason many Americans need social programs in the first place.
Monnett is a junior Computer Sci-
ence and Political Science double ma-
jor from Cloverdale, Indiana.