February 7 2012
Hey, That's Not Fair!
Charlotte Hays
President Obama is always on about “fairness.” The president justifies his policies by appealing to the ideas of equality, justice, and fairness, irritatingly implying that the rest of us favor inequality, injustice, and unfairness. But are his policies really fair?
If you only read one article today, it must be Stephen Moore’s “Fairness Quiz” for President Obama, which asks how the existing system stacks up and probes the fairness of the president’s own proposals.
Here are my top 5 items in the Fairness Quiz:
Is it fair that the richest 1% of Americans pay nearly 40% of all federal income taxes, and the richest 10% pay two-thirds of the tax?
Is it fair that President Obama sends his two daughters to elite private schools that are safer, better-run, and produce higher test scores than public schools in Washington, D.C.—but millions of other families across America are denied that free choice and forced to send their kids to rotten schools?
Is it fair that Americans who build a family business, hire workers, reinvest and save their money—paying a lifetime of federal, state and local taxes often climbing into the millions of dollars—must then pay an additional estate tax of 35% (and as much as 55% when the law changes next year) when they die, rather than passing that money onto their loved ones?
Is it fair that wind, solar and ethanol producers get billions of dollars of subsidies each year and pay virtually no taxes, while the oil and gas industry—which provides at least 10 times as much energy—pays tens of billions of dollars of taxes while the president complains that it is "subsidized"?
Is it fair that those who work full-time jobs (and sometimes more) to make ends meet have to pay taxes to support up to 99 weeks of unemployment benefits for those who don't work?
Believe me, it wasn’t easy making a list of the top five entries on the Fairness Quiz. Coming up with a mere five favorites meant foregoing the one on Timothy “Turbo Tax” Geitner, which was particularly hard to do in light of this recent news report.
Words, as President Obama once said, matter and when a virtue such as fairness is redefined in an Orwellian and highly ideology-driven way, then much depends on our ability to reclaim the word.
