The Offensiveness of (Almost) Everything

Ah, serendipity. Dana Milbank, an op-ed writer for the Washington Post, rolled out a column today about “one of the most annoying components of our decaying political culture: false umbrage.” Nominally about the conservative blogosphere’s overheated, slightly hysterical reaction to a tweet by David Axlerod about chimichangas (just read the column; it’s a long story), Milbank’s column takes a broader look at the apology-hungry culture of Washington. Offense is taken at the tiniest slight, from standard campaign mud-slinging (Newt Gingrich slams Mitt Romney on immigration) to rude slips of the tongue (basically anything Joe Biden says). Even as Milbank was writing his column, Eric Wemple, his colleague at the Post, was pointing to the morning’s latest example of false outrage: Jack Shafer, the media critic for Reuters, dinged the White House for expressing sorrow over the death of Pulizter Prize-winning reporter Anthony Shadid. “The White House should shut up,” Shafer tweeted. “Bad form for the WH to endorse journalists (living or dead), don’t you think?” No, I don’t think. Other media types didn’t think so either, prompting what Wemple characterized as “a Friday afternoon Twitterama.”

Shafer’s snarky umbrage-taking paled in comparison to the day’s real proof of Milbank’s point, however. Charles Blow, a New York Times columnist who leans even further left than Milbank himself, offered a Friday evening overreaction of his own. Blow’s column, titled “Rick Santorum’s Gospel of Inequality,” took serious offense at comments that were, for Rick “man on dog” Santorum, actually pretty benign. In a speech to the Detroit Economic Forum, the candidate said:

I’m not about equality of result when it comes to income inequality. There is income inequality in America. There always has been and, hopefully, and I do say that, there always will be.

If the speaker had been someone other than Santorum, would Blow have still found the remarks “unbelievable,” “stunning” and “unhinged”? Does he have the same reaction when liberal pundits refute Mitt Romney’s allegation that President Obama is for “equality of outcome” by noting the major difference between equality of outcome — which Obama has never advocated — and equality of opportunity?

There is nothing offensive, or even particularly conservative, about Santorum’s remarks. No one — including, I suspect, Blow himself — is for “equality of result.” It makes little sense to pay a surgeon the same salary as a Starbucks barista. Different income levels are the driving force behind American innovation, as hard work is rewarded with higher income. The problem is not income inequality but the degree of income inequality. It’s one thing for CEOs at large companies to make 42 times as much as the average worker, as they did in 1980; it’s another thing entirely for CEOs to make 531 times as much, as they did in 2001. Few people begrudged Steve Jobs his billions, and fewer people would have thought it logical to pay Jobs the same salary as an Apple Store salesman.

Fundamentally, this is all Santorum is saying when he hopes “there always will be” income inequality. Yet Blow, in an attempt to manufacture outrage at an otherwise innocent statement, conflates Santorum’s remarks with the general Republican distaste for any government efforts to level the playing field. This outrage is particularly silly — and in this regard reminiscent of the fuss over Mitt Romney’s out-of-context “I like to fire people” comment — considering Santorum’s rich history of making truly outrageous statements about inequality and poverty. He accuses President Obama of “systematically destroying the work ethic … by the narcotic of government dependency.” He slams “liberal welfare policies,” claiming that “we know from our history that taking care of people destroys them, destroys communities, destroys families, destroys country.” And let’s not forget the classic assertion that “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them other people’s money.” (Or perhaps he said “blah people.” We’ll never know.)

In labeling Santorum’s take on inequality “stunning,” Blow also ignores the fact that, of the remaining four Republican candidates, Santorum is the only one who gives a fig about the poor, albeit in his own faintly perverse way. When Mitt Romney was forced to defend his statement that “I’m not concerned about the very poor,” Santorum’s response — that “I really believe that we should care about the very poor, unlike Governor Romney” — was at least more believable than Newt Gingrich’s blather about the pursuit of happiness. Santorum, whether you agree with him or not, genuinely believes that promoting traditional families and Christian values is in the best interest of those at the bottom of the economic ladder. While his proposed policies would actually eviscerate programs like Medicaid and food stamps, he seems truly convinced that a Santorum administration would care about the poor. That’s more than you can say for Romney, whose cluelessness leads him to describe $374,000 as “not very much,” and who mentions the poor only as an afterthought.

The anodyne nature of Santorum’s inequality comments is further emphasized by the rest of Blow’s column, in which he runs through a list of infinitely more ludicrous Santorum quotations — including the candidate’s suggestion that the Obama administration’s contraception-coverage mandate will put America on the road to guillotine of the French Revolution. There’s no need to turn a mountain into a molehill, as Blow has done with a statement about income inequality that, by itself, is no more offensive than the fact that Charles Blow makes more money than the New York Times’ janitor. When Santorum starts blaming Boston liberals for pedophilic Catholic priests and “radical feminists” for oppressing women . . . that is when we can all take umbrage — and there will be nothing false about it.

Yet Another Chart You Need to See

Pseudo-intellectual publications like Mother Jones are always angling for page views with posts like “Eleven Charts That Explain What’s Wrong With America” and “Overworked America: 12 Charts That Will Make Your Blood Boil.” Even the Atlantic gets in the game with “The Chart That Should Accompany All Discussions of the Debt Ceiling.” Some of these neat little graphs are actually informative; others, like the one talked up by the Atlantic, raise more questions than they answer (e.g. “can you really blame all the Bush tax cuts on Bush when Obama extended them?). Invariably, the pie chart or trend line is used by the author to demagogue about whatever injustice, from income inequality to tax avoidance, has animated him (or her) that day. This chart, from the slightly more sober New York Times, really does speak volumes, however. It’s a shame that it hasn’t gotten the sort of breathless play that Mother Jones gave the blood-boilers.

The gist of the accompanying article, by Floyd Norris, is that companies — what Republicans invariably refer to as “job creators” have never been doing better. Workers, on the other hand, have never been doing worse. The statistics are eye-opening:

In the eight decades before the recent recession, there was never a period when as much as 9 percent of American gross domestic product went to companies in the form of after-tax profits. Now the figure is over 10 percent.

During the same period, there never was a quarter when wage and salary income amounted to less than 45 percent of the economy. Now the figure is below 44 percent.

Furthermore, corporate taxes as a percentage of profits have hit an all-time low of 21 percent. The average, since 1960, is 34 percent. Personal taxes as a percentage of income have also decreased, though by a much smaller amount. They now stand at 14.1 percent of income, compared to an average of 15.1 percent.

This information, which was released by the Commerce Department, puts the lie to the conservative shibboleth that a high taxes are “killing jobs” and preventing companies from expanding. When Rick Perry claims that “the tax structure that we have in place in this country is what drove the masses away,” his rhetoric does not match the facts. And when the Republican members of the deficit-reduction supercommittee argue that the tax increases proposed by Democrats “would kill job creation and economic recovery,” they are ignoring the fact that companies have never had it so good. Surely corporate America wasn’t suffering under Ronald Reagan’s presidency, when taxes took a much larger slice of profits. Even if we take at face value the theory that “business decisions are highly sensitive to the rates of the capital gains, dividends and death tax,” we’re left with the conclusion that lower tax rates have led to . . . less hiring? Fewer jobs? The GOP lambastes President Obama’s economic policy as more of the same, but it really should be asking what it hopes to achieve with more of the same Bush-era tax rates. I’m not going to argue that higher corporate taxes would create jobs, but they would certainly help unemployed and low-income Americans weather the recession. If we’re looking for cash to fund food stamps and Medicaid, perhaps we should heed Willie Sutton’s advice, apocryphal though it may be, and look to banks and other corporations: Because that’s where the money is. This is not Occupy Wall Street-style screed against banks or any other money-making behemoth. Rather, it’s a simple acknowledgement that the people and companies who have done best over the past fifty years can afford to chip in a bit more.

As Times columnist Paul Krugman has repeated ad infinitum, the U.S. economic crisis is not one of businesses stifled by the heavy hand of government; instead, it is primarily a problem of demand. Companies are earning plenty of money; in fact, most large corporations are sitting on record piles of cash. If Apple wanted to open a thousand more stores or Pepsi wanted to build a new bottling plant, a lack of funds or a debilitating corporate tax rate is hardly preventing them from doing so. The real hurdle to expansion is the lack of demand: consumers just aren’t buying. And who can blame them? With wages at an all-time low as a percentage of GDP, it’s no wonder that Americans are reluctant to open their wallets.

Frankly, it’s enough to make your blood boil.