Here I use the word shit symbolically, a perfectly legitimate one in the English language, rather than as the vulgar form of fecal matter or to defecate. It is versatile enough to capture the flavour of lives lived at the deepest end of the socio-economic valley. The joke where an optimist says we will all soon be eating shit only to get the pessimist’s response that there won’t be enough to go around nicely, if somewhat loutishly, demonstrates how framing can alter how we view this particular form of bodily effluvia: From a waste product to a foodstuff that becomes desirable when there is not enough of it. I’m of course stretching what is basically low humour into convenient metaphor, but if it conveys how framing can change perspective then it has been a useful exercise.
Just read an article written by the right wing conspiracy funded Fraser Institute, which has conveniently framed the issue of the 1% within a fair tax paying context. This, obviously, to counter the leftist, socialist conspiracy attacks on the unfair share of income garnered by the 1%. The clever way in which it is done makes the 1% percent seem not only saintly but indispensable for the very existence of our enlightened welfare state. A story is spun to show that the 1% does not only actually pay taxes but that they contribute far more than their fair share to overall tax revenues. As you may have guessed, it’s all a numbers game with a smorgasbord of conclusions, depending how you want to spin them.
In pit and substance the piece says that in 2011, in Canada, the top 1% paid 20% of the total tax bill (these numbers have not been verified). So there! Stop vilifying those nice people who took home a measly half of the whopping proportion they paid in taxes, that is 10% of all income in the country. And that 20% funded lots of great stuff like education, social programs and health spending while, I suppose, as it isn’t mentioned in the piece, the taxes paid by the 99% funded chopped liver.
Let’s try and put some of these lament-for-the-perhaps-very-overpaid numbers into perspective. First of all it’s actually 0.8% and not 1% that take home the 10% of income. Not to cast aspersions on the author’s motives, but when he says “let’s round up the 0.8% to 1% to make calculations easier,” he is making one big, misleading suggestion. He just increased that group of nice, benevolent rich folk by 25% and never once needed to use that bit of whopping rounding in his calculations. To get a flavour for what that means imagine that there are only 1000 people in the economy and that the entire thing (the economy) is worth $100. That means that 8 people take home $10, or $1.25 person, while the other 992 people take home $90, or about 9 cents per person. However, by increasing the .08% to 1% that becomes only $1 per rich person relative to 10 cents for each of the common people. It’s still terribly skewed but with the opportune rounding, however unnecessary for the article, it doesn’t look quite as obscene.
The upshot, of course, is that adroit framing shifts attention from the huge income inequality, which is bad, and bad for the good reasons laid out below, to a hyper generous crowd that happily pays a disproportionate share of the total tax bill. Well, if they pay such a humongous share of the tax bill, these poor wealthy people must surely be positively bereft, and left, after their overwhelming generosity, with much less to spend frivolously. Would that were true. The fact is they are left with close to the same proportion of total income after taxes as they took home before taxes, 9%. This is because the proportion of their voluminous income paid in taxes is relatively small.
Before I get into why income inequality is bad let me set the record straight: I am not, in principle, against people making obscene amounts of money, legitimately, rather than doing so by acquiring disproportionate market and political power. I am against income inequality at these offensive levels because it creates inequality of opportunity not just once but in a growing, sustained way. If you start off in the top 1% or 20% you will likely stay there just as you will very probably stay at the bottom if you start off there. Not only will the bottom have a huge handicap in the competition that is life but their numbers will grow as the top inexorably takes a growing share of income. It’s not that complicated unless you want to make it so, like the piece that tries to lamentably show that this inequality thing is some sort of myth. Even if inequality doesn’t grow, and that is highly unlikely given the dynamics of income and wealth accumulation, at current levels, it is still far too skewed. People at the bottom do not get the same medical care, nutrition, access to top quality education and certainly do not have the connections to grease them into a rewarding career. There is a strong relationship between income inequality and equality of opportunity and it is not very favorable to the lower end of the income scale.
While Capitalism and Democracy are far from perfect systems they are, presently, the best we have among a plethora of poor choices – Autocracy, Plutocracy, Theocracy, Kleptocracy, state control of the means of production, etc. But we humans have been selected by nature to try and get as much stuff as possible, a behavioural trait which is neither good nor bad; it just is, a survival impulse. And that greed, a suggestive term for what is no more than an evolutionary imperative, operates under any system, including democracy. To that extent, trying to get a disproportionate share of the pie is a natural tendency and the perfect system that might automatically control for such behaviour we do not yet have. Until and if we ever get it, there needs to be put in and keep in place artificial barriers, such as regulations and constraints on outlandish income inequalities, to ensure continued growth in prosperity as well as the maintenance of a healthy democracy.
