Fool Me Twice

by Aaron Klein

  When the individual liberty of the Founders was transformed into the national interest of Teddy Roosevelt and the Progressives, we were only one generation away from a major threat to all our personal liberties. That threat still exists today.4

  So wrote Burton W. Folsom Jr., professor of history at Hillsdale College and senior historian at the Foundation for Economic Education, in October 2010.5 Folsom was referring to the first President Roosevelt’s August 31, 1910, “New Nationalism” speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, urging greater government control over the economy.6

  On December 6, 2011, Barack Obama—who well knows the history of the place—delivered his own speech in Osawatomie.7 But Obama’s speech contained no mention of the reason for his presidential predecessor’s visit to Osawatomie—the commemoration of revolutionary abolitionist John Brown—for which Roosevelt had been invited to dedicate the John Brown Memorial Park. But neither Roosevelt nor Obama had come to Osawatomie to right a great historic wrong, as had America’s most famous, if also notorious, abolitionist.

  On August 30, 1856, Brown led the Pottawatomie Massacre, in which five men were killed, at what was named Bleeding Kansas. Brown later led the unsuccessful takeover of the Federal munitions arsenal at Harper’s Ferry (later West Virginia) in 1859. The Commonwealth of Virginia tried Brown for treason, for the murder of five more men, and for inciting a slave insurrection. He was found guilty on all counts and hanged. But the controversy about Brown, his persona, his methods, and his secret abolitionist backers, never died.

  According to Ken Chowder, author of a documentary about Brown for public television:

  John Brown’s soul was already marching on. But the flesh-and-blood John Brown—a tanner, shepherd, and farmer, a simple and innocent man who could kill in cold blood, a mixture of opposite parts who mirrored the paradoxical America of his time—this John Brown had already vanished, and he would rarely appear again. His life instead became the subject for 140 years of spin.8

  Also not mentioned by Obama, for understandable reasons, was that Osawatomie became the name of the newspaper launched by the radical anti-capitalist, domestic terrorist group, the Weather Underground.9 The Weatherman had been led by two Pentagon-bombing radicals, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who later became Barack Obama’s Hyde Park neighbors and close personal and political associates, as we have documented copiously in our previous book, The Manchurian President. Each issue of the Weather Underground newspaper included a printed picture of John Brown, with an explanation underneath as to why the publication had been named Osawatomie.10

  In his December 2011 Osawatomie speech, Obama also soundly denounced capitalism, saying it “doesn’t work, it has never worked.”11 These words of the president echoed those of Michigan’s Marxist congressman, John Conyers Jr., who, a month earlier, had told a gathering of the Democratic Socialists of America, “This system, this capitalist system, is broken and may be un-repairable because the regulatory forces in the government are not willing to step up to the plate.”12

  The meaning of Obama’s Osawatomie speech was well explained by Matthew Spalding of National Review Online. In his August 1910 speech, Spalding noted, Roosevelt was “at his most progressive”—as was Obama nearly 100 years later:

  If there was any doubt before, it is now clear that [Obama] has given up on the center of American politics and doubled down on his governing model. And this tells us everything about where he is coming from and where he wants to go.13

  At Osawatomie, Obama repeatedly invoked fairness. Fairness, as Obama defined it, is “when everyone engages in fair play, and everybody gets a fair shot, and everybody does their fair share.” (The fairness expressed by Karl Marx was, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”14) Raising taxes on the wealthy would only be fair, Obama said, since somebody has to pay for all of his “investments” in infrastructure, education, and “green” projects, not to mention the expansion of unemployment benefits, of government bureaucracy and regulations, and the creation of new jobs programs he is pushing.

  In truth, Obama’s progressive conception of fairness is not the classic Marxist one, for Marx was the prophet and theoretician of a revolutionary working class. But today’s neo-socialist progressives have completely abandoned and betrayed the working class, along with small-business owners, in favor of a welfare class, a middle class ever more dependent on government hand-outs, and a progressive, liberal elite. As Spalding puts it:

  Obama has abandoned the “average, middle-class voter and his middle-class values” and “[cobbled] together an alliance of state dependents, government hangers-on, and political elites who claim the capacity to run things.” This is the rise of a “new governing class that insists on enforcing political and economic ‘fairness’ rather than letting us govern ourselves. The managed quest for fairness inevitably leads to bureaucratic favoritism, inequalities based on special interests, and undue political influence.”

  If not stopped, this corrupt and economically unsustainable fairness train will be used to steamroll American citizens for another four years and what will be left of our democracy, at the end of the line, will be unrecognizable.

  PAYCHECK FAIRNESS

  Progressives such as the Economic Policy Institute almost always include “fair pay” in their credos. Thus, EPI “believes every working person deserves a good job with fair pay, affordable health care, and retirement security.”15

  We should also credit progressive Democrats both for rhetorical consistency, and for persistence. President Obama’s January 2012 State of the Union address called for “equal pay for equal work.” President Clinton’s 1999 State of the Union address had employed identical verbiage—“equal pay for equal work.” Clinton’s SOTU pronouncement came on the heels of AFL-CIO support for the Paycheck Fairness Act of 1997,16 a piece of legislation intended to amend and “improve” the Equal Pay Act of 1963.17 The 1997 legislation has never been passed, but its ultimate adoption remains a prime progressive goal.

  Originally, “equal pay” legislation was meant to ensure women would not be paid less for doing the same jobs as men. The 1963 Equal Pay Act addressed pay discrimination claims limited to “the few situations where women and men are doing ‘substantially the same’ work,” while the newer legislation “would allow a broader range of jobs to be evaluated for gender bias” and “toughen the remedies allowed under the Equal Pay Act,” as well as “funnel more resources into enforcement.”18

  Sen. Tom Daschle (D-SD) introduced the Paycheck Fairness Act of 1997 in the Senate, along with twenty-three progressive Democrat co-sponsors.19 A bill of the same name was introduced in the House by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), along with ninety-five co-sponsors,20 and DeLauro has re-introduced the bill in every session of Congress through the most current one.21 At the time, the likelihood of the bill’s passage was considered doubtful, although five state-level “fair pay” laws had been passed and additional laws were being considered in twenty-seven states, “pushed primarily by the state federations of the AFL-CIO.”22 Again in 1999, both the Paycheck Fairness Act and the Equal Pay Initiative were re-introduced in Congress. Opponents claimed the bills not only overlapped with the Equal Pay Act of 1963 but also that:

  the new regulations would “create costly litigation and frivolous lawsuits. The legislation would allow women to sue their employers for unlimited compensatory and punitive damages in addition to the limited damages and back-pay awards available under federal law.”23

  A National Committee on Pay Equity—which included the working women department of the AFL-CIO—was founded in 1979 as a “coalition of women’s groups, civil-rights organizations and unions concerned about the wage gap.” Twenty years later, the AFL-CIO’s Karen Nussbaum claimed: “The average working family loses more than $4,000 a year because of the wage gap.”24 In 2002, the Economic Policy Institute’s Heather Boushey was claiming that “women working full-time earn, on average, 80 cents for every dollar earned by men, they work longer
hours for the same paycheck.”25

  Arguing for the opposition were Diana Furchtgott-Roth and Christine Stolba, authors of Women’s Figures, a book published in 1999 by the American Enterprise Institute. They produced data showing:

  childless women between the ages of 27 and 33 [were making] 98 cents to every man’s dollar—a statistic that shatters the glass-ceiling and “pink-ghetto” myths.26

  Another opponent, Anita K. Blair, who was then vice president of the conservative Independent Women’s Forum, claimed in 1999 that the AFLCIO skewed its numbers in “an attempt to make everything ‘unionized.’”27 The AFL-CIO, Blair said, wants

  our salaries to be decided by government agencies rather than a worker and her boss. Mothers generally make career decisions that result in less hours or wages. That doesn’t mean if you’re a mother in the workforce that you are being paid less.

  In a 1999 article published in the Civil Rights Journal, Diana Furchtgott-Roth addressed a joint AFL-CIO/Institute for Women’s Policy Research study that “calculated the cost of alleged ‘pay inequity’ caused by the predominance of women and men in different occupational categories.”28 The union-financed study, she continued, “compared the wages of workers in female-dominated occupations with those in non-female-dominated occupations. The workers had the same sex, age, race, educational level, marital and parental status, and urban/rural status; they lived in the same part of the country and worked the same number of hours; and they worked in firms of the same size in the same industry.” The study “concluded that women were underpaid by $89 billion per year because of occupational segregation. Without sex, race, marital and parental status, and firm and industry variables, this figure rose to $200 billion per year,” Furchtgott-Roth wrote.

  Although the study boasted “an impressive list of variables,” Furchtgott-Roth pointed to two major factors it neglected:

  First, it omits the type of job … Second, it leaves out the field of education. It is meaningless to say that the earnings of a man or a woman with a B.A. in English should be the same as the earnings of a man or a woman with a B.A. in math. So the study compares workers without regard to education or type of work: secretaries are being compared with loggers, bookkeepers with oil drillers.

  Ahead of the 2000 general election, Furchtgott-Roth announced in the American Spectator that “comparable work” was back on the table.29

  It’s five months before the November elections, and ultra-liberals Tom Harkin and Ted Kennedy are holding court in Dirksen Senate Office Building [in a hearing] … establishing comparable worth–federal wage and salary controls regulating how much employers must pay each male and female worker.

  But in 2002 EPI’s Heather Boushey was claiming that “comparable worth” would help to eliminate the failure of affirmative action to completely close the wage gap and wage penalty visited upon women for working in a predominantly female occupation like nursing, which requires high levels of education and certification. This was due, she wrote, to the “high degree of segregation of women and men into different types of jobs.”30

  Occupations that have been historically dominated by women are often poorly paid compared to occupations that are dominated by men and that require comparable levels of skill and education.

  The proposed comparable-worth legislation, Boushey claimed, “could reduce the wage gap and help low-wage workers without creating an excessive burden for employers.”

  The above discussion shows the persistence of progressive attempts to socially engineer wages, well beyond the principle of paying women the same as men for doing the same jobs. In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt had called on all employers to sign a Code of Fair Competition agreement as “part of a nationwide plan to raise wages, create employment, and thus increase purchasing power and restore business.”31 It was a detailed code regulating child labor, women’s labor, hours of business operation, pay rates, a minimum wage, prices, and more.

  Diana Furchtgott-Roth, in her American Spectator article, provided a detailed critique of this entire approach. She relies, in part, on former Congressional Budget Office director June O’Neill, in whose view

  comparable worth demeaned women because “it conveys the message that women cannot compete in nontraditional jobs and can only be helped through the patronage of a job evaluator.”32

  So now, Furchtgott-Roth pointed out, progressives have simply rebranded comparable worth as pay equity.

  It’s a warm, fuzzy concept, designed to lure working women with the promise of potential raises and to discourage political opposition. After all, who could be against equity?

  Furchtgott-Roth also explains what passage of the convoluted Fair Pay Act would mean:

  The Fair Pay Act would require employers to compensate workers according to an artificial calculation of a job’s “value” rather than on what anyone is willing to pay. It would extend the current “equal pay for equal work” doctrine of federal law to equal pay for very different jobs, with the goal of raising the pay of women in female-dominated occupations. In other words, federal bureaucrats would decide which jobs are underpaid and would require employers to raise those wages…. It defines discrimination as paying different wages for “equivalent” jobs that are dominated by employees of a particular sex or racial group. In the bill’s own words, “The term ‘equivalent jobs’ means jobs that may be dissimilar, but whose requirements are equivalent, when viewed as a composite of skills, effort, responsibility, and working conditions.”33

  (In a modest progressive compromise—for now—the most recent rendition of the Pay Fairness Act, introduced in April 2011 by Representative DeLauro, does not as specifically stipulate wage controls as did FDR’s.)

  In 2000, proponents of the Pay Fairness Act were declaring: “The time to pass the bill is now.” We are hearing the same thing about much of today’s legislation—“We can’t wait.” While none of the bills were expected to pass in Congress in 2000, Furchtgott-Roth was warning then that “comparable worth and pay equity”—or some other version—could easily become law if then candidate Al Gore were elected president and the Democrats retook Congress. This is the same danger American voters should concern themselves with today. Should Barack Obama be reelected, and/or the Democrats retake control of Congress, find ourselves faced with Depression-era wage and price controls—or worse.

  Bear in mind: in June 2000, President Clinton wanted regulations to make it easier to “punish firms for pay equity infractions through denial or withdrawal of federal contracts.”34 In 1997, Vice President Al Gore told the AFL-CIO, “We’re going to send a message to companies that want to do business with the federal government: How you treat employees and how you treat unions counts with us.”35 In October 2010, President Obama put it more pithily to Latino voters: “We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends.”

  FAIR TAXATION FOR THE RICH—OR CLASS WARFARE?

  The progressive Troika—Economic Policy Institute, Demos and the Century Foundation—along with many other progressive groups, have published numerous articles about taxing the rich, all of which predict dire consequences if such taxation is not increased, or if—heaven forbid—it should stop. Case in point, an August 2010 commentary by John Irons, then EPI’s research and policy director, and by Andrew Fieldhouse, EPI/Century Foundation federal budget policy analyst:

  Economist Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics estimates that every dollar spent making the Bush income tax cuts permanent generates only 32 cents of economic activity. Comparatively, every dollar spent on unemployment assistance generates $1.61 worth of economic activity, a dollar of spending on infrastructure yields $1.57 and a dollar in assistance to states to prevent layoffs of teachers or first responders yields $1.41. Tax cuts for the wealthy are simply not a good way to stimulate the economy….

  Simply put, the cost of extending the upper-income Bush tax cuts, in both dollars and lost opportunities, is unacceptably high….

  A one- or two-year extension of the cut
s for the wealthy is a poorly designed stimulus and would set a fiscally irresponsible precedent for our nation’s long-run budgetary planning. Congress should extend permanently reductions for the middle class and let the other provisions expire.

  We need to streamline and modernize the tax code, not perpetuate a failed system.36

  In an August 2011 briefing paper, Fieldhouse and Isaac Shapiro, EPI director of regulatory policy research, claim the top 1 percent of households “benefited disproportionately” from the Bush-era tax cuts. The top 1 percent “received 38% of the total amount of these tax cuts, which is more than the combined amount of the total amount of the tax cuts received by the bottom 80% of tax filers.”37

  The key phrase here is “bottom 80% of tax filers,” because now half of all Americans pay no federal income tax at all.

  A Heritage Foundation analysis over nearly fifty years—from 1962 to 2009—based on data gleaned from individual income returns, calculated in February 2012 that the “percentage of people who do not pay federal income taxes, and who are not claimed as dependents by someone who does pay them, jumped from 14.8 percent in 1984 to 49.5 percent in 2009…. That means 151.7 million Americans paid nothing in 2009. By comparison, 34.8 million tax filers paid no taxes in 1984.”38

  The U.S. Treasury’s Office of Tax Analysis reports U.S. individual income tax is “highly progressive,” meaning “a small group of higher-income taxpayers [pay] most of the individual income taxes each year.”39 The top 1 percent of taxpayers, for example, “paid 33.7 percent of all individual income taxes in 2002. This group of taxpayers has paid more than 30 percent of individual income taxes since 1995. Moreover, since 1990 this group’s tax share has grown faster than their income share.”