See also kill the poor.
Any transaction is a redistribution of wealth. The $15 CD you purchase
impoverishes you by $15, which gets redistributed to various individuals in the
music and retail
food chains. But when a
politician or his
mark mouths
the phrase, it's usually a pile of
bunk, designed to equate something with
hordes of angry
peasants coming over to violently divvy up the master's
huge
tracts of land, in order to conduct a more economically meaningful existence.
The only modern-day vestiges of such a redistribution of wealth comes in the
form of the various proposed
agrarian reforms in past decades in places like
Latin America and, recently,
Zimbabwe.
But to single out some government policy as "redistribution of wealth" is
dishonest in the extreme; it's all redistribution, not just the
policies you don't like. Isn't Social Security, in its current form, a
generational redistribution of wealth? (And aren't the schemes to privatize
parts of it a redistribution of wealth to the securities industry?) When
Ronald Reagan and the Democrats and Republicans in Congress put the
country essentially on a war budget, with massive increases in both defense
spending and the national deficit (a trend started, actually, in the tail end
of Jimmy Carter's term in office), there was a redistribution of wealth
away from the unrich, in that among the first places to look for
spending cuts was in social spending, grants and subsidies that go to the
"poor", as the stereotype goes (Medicare and Medicaid, for instance, but you'd
perhaps be surprised at how many middle-class families avail themselves of that
"stuff-for-the-poor"), but
also to the "common man" (Pell Grants and unemployment insurance, et mucho al). The
various cuts were such, that when the Reagan/Bush early-90's recession came along,
Bush and Congress had to pass a series of supplemental
unemployment-insurance bills to essentially restore the amount of coverage that
would have existed prior to the redistribution of wealth to the rich in those
Reagan/Bush years. It was either that, or deal with an angered, unemployed
peasantry.
And, by the way, aren't high estate taxes a plague of the rich? Aren't they
smart enough, savvy enough, to hire the proper tax lawyers to get around all
that, much as those who were in the old, rarefied air of the 90% income-tax
bracket found it worth their while to retain the services of a good tax lawyer
or accountant? Those who should be scared of high estate taxes can afford to
work around the scare, while the other (conservative estimate) 95% of the
population can rest easy, with the confidence that those peasant hordes won't
be coming around to hijack Grandpa's golf clubs after he kicks the bucket.
Taxes themselves are the lifeblood of government "by the people, for the
people". If they're too high for your tastes, after all the various tax cuts
over the decades, maybe you're just too greedy. Or maybe you should move.
America: Love it, or leave it.