Two Americas? Whose Fault is That?

If the Kerry/Edwards ticket thinks it sees two Americas, they should take a look at my house. I’m sure they’d see two families – the Haves and the Have-nots. Two little people who have no money to buy anything, and two adults who – at least in our kids’ eyes – have all the money in the world.

But what I see are the I Want Its and the I Have To Pay For Its. There is nothing our kids won’t ask for. But then, it’s not their money. They may as well ask since it’s not going to cost them a dime. And when we greedy parents tell them they can’t have it, they whine about how mean we are.

I see the same thing happening in our society, and pushing more of the tax burden on the wealthy will only make it worse. But that is precisely what John Kerry and John Edwards are proposing with their promise to raise taxes on the well-off in order to give tax breaks to the poor and middle class.

As enticing as their argument for tax "fairness" sounds, it is a dangerous path.

I’ll stay away from the standard conservative argument that the top five or ten percent of wage-earners already pay more than their fair share of taxes. The threat to our economic well-being goes much deeper than who pays what.

The danger lies in that as we shift the tax burden further up the income ladder, fewer and fewer people at the bottom pay anything. On the surface, that sounds like a wonderful turn of events. But in essence, we are creating an ever larger and ever more powerful voting bloc of people who have no economic stake in controlling government spending.

That’s because, just like my kids, it costs them nothing. So every program, every benefit, comes at the expense of someone else. Who cares how much it costs, we’ll get those people with all the money to pay for it.

That’s a recipe for social and economic disaster. A social disaster because it worsens the sense of entitlement that is already becoming too ingrained in our collective psyche. We feel we should have everything – good roads, good schools, good healthcare – and someone else should pay for it.

Can’t afford daycare – let’s tax the rich. Can’t get health insurance – let’s tax the rich. Budget deficit is exploding – let’s tax the rich.

Never mind that there just aren’t enough rich people. We could tax 100 percent of the income from people making more than $200,000 a year, and we’d still be half a trillion (yes, trillion) short of paying for health insurance for all.

Far worse is the lack of responsibility such policies engender.

My dad told me when I was sixteen that if I wanted a car that I’d have to pay for it. Not because he couldn’t afford it, but because he knew that I would take much better care of it if I were the one paying the bills. That same premise holds true for us as a society. We are much better stewards when it’s coming out of our own pocket.

The Democrats may fear that we are becoming two Americas, but it’s not without their help. That’s because nothing will split us faster than the two separate classes we are slowly creating – those who want and those who pay.