One of John McCain’s goofier political moves came in the last couple of weeks of the campaign when — with eyes darting, arms pumping frenetically and lips sneering — he assailed Barack Obama for saying, “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”
Oh, wailed McCain, that’s vile socialism! And a chorus of right-wing harpies chimed in with overwrought
accusations of “Marxism,” “communism” and outright “un-Americanism.” They thought they had caught Obama in a game-changing gaffe — omigosh, he just called for spreading America’s wealth!
The problem for the clueless McCainites, however, was that your average American
was not repulsed, but cheered by Obama’s position.
After all, for the past three decades, Wall Street and Washington have been
using tax policy, trade policy, labor policy, regulatory policy, farm policy
and every other policy they could think up to haul wealth from the workaday
majority to the elites at the top. These forces of plutocracy have been
fabulously successful. Since the early 1980s, when the new Gilded Age was
launched as official policy, all of the net financial gains have flowed to the
richest 5 percent of Americans, with the bulk of that going to the richest 1
percent.
This deliberate concentration of Americans’ wealth has made our economy undemocratic and top-heavy, and now the whole thing
is toppling. As FDR said about the last great financial crash, “We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now
that it is bad economics.”
Or, to put it in the more colloquial terms of my Texas upbringing: Money is like
manure — it only works if you spread it around.
That’s what the president-to-be has in mind, and one of the most productive ways to
achieve it is to implement his big idea of reinvesting in the gumption and
genius of grassroots people. He proposes to put Americans to work on two huge
national needs: the repair and expansion of our inadequate infrastructure, and
the conversion to a green energy economy.
Across the nation, from big cities to rural areas, the public’s essential assets are in obvious need of work. Such old assets such as bridges,
schools, roads, libraries, subways, parks and community centers need fixes and
upgrades. Meanwhile, new assets need to be developed and put in place,
including high-speed trains, solar and wind installations, free broadband
access for all and conservation retrofits for homes and buildings.
Yes, this will cost some serious money — Obama’s own tally totals more than $200 billion, and the real number is likely to top
$500 billion. But, unlike the gabillions that Washington is presently doling
out to the failed Wall Street wizards, this will be money that goes into the
real economy — it’ll produce tangible facilities and improvements that will deliver returns to
America for decades to come.
Too many pundits and politicos (including some weak-kneed Democrats) are urging
Obama to scale down his ideas for America, to go slow and to slide over to the
middle of the road. But as a farmer told me years ago, “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.”
This election was about change, and the people were not voting for the small
change of conventional politics. They were voting for big ideas, for boldness,
and, yes, they were even voting to spread wealth to everybody.
Jim Hightower is a national radio
commentator, columnist and author.
This article appears in Nov 13-19, 2008.
