Working families -- Dems love 'em (stuffed)
by Don Feder
Jewish World Review
EASILY THE MOST IRRITATING aspect of the
campaign season is the Democratic refrain about
"working families."
In introducing the president and vice president at a
Boston fund-raiser in September, Sen. Ted Kennedy
hailed them as "the home-run kings of working
families." Presumably, Clinton and Gore copped this
prestigious title by opposing educational vouchers
for the poor and tax cuts for the middle class.
Kennedy looks as if he never lifted anything heavier than a cocktail shaker and
hasn't missed a meal since the Roosevelt administration (Teddy's). The spectacle
of this plutocrat holding forth on "working families," at a $1,000-a-plate gala no
less, is rich in irony. What next, a Clinton sermon on Seventh Commandment
(adultery)?
Still, Democrats are addicted to the
catchphrase. An ad for a
Democratic gubernatorial
candidate charges that his
opponent's tax cuts "favor the
rich," while his own target
"working families."
You will search in vain through the
liberal lexicon for a definition of
"working families," which surely is
intentional. The never-defined
phrase can mean anything.
"Working families" has such a nice, homey ring. It conjures up an image of Mom
and Dad at the kitchen table, with a pile of bills in front of them, making out the
household budget -- trying to stretch Dad's paycheck to cover Junior's braces
and Sis' piano lessons. Mom wears an apron, Dad a sweater with elbow patches.
By "working families," apparently Democrats do not mean the subsidized poor
(although one campaign press aide assured me that a welfare mother who
worked 20 hours a week would qualify because she was "struggling"), nor the
disgusting rich, even though many of them struggled to make their wealth and
work just as hard to keep it from rapacious politicians.
Instead, the standard appears to be one of exertion in the face of obstacles
combined with an income cap.
In my family, everyone works, from my 86-year-old mother who knits afghans for
friends and relatives to my 17-year-old son who delivers pizzas after school.
I get up at 5:15 a.m. to drive an hour and a half, each way, to the office and put in
8-hour days. With work at home in the evenings and weekends, the total often
rises to 60-hours a week.
Still, malefactor of great wealth that I am, our income is more than twice that of the
typical American family. Even though we're working hard to meet mortgage and
car payments, alas, we do not qualify as a working family.
At least, that's the way we're treated by the self-proclaimed party of same.
On those rare occasions when Democrats can bring themselves to propose a tax
cut, there's always an income ceiling well below our earnings, on the theory that
it would be a mortal sin to reduce the tax burden of the undeserving rich, even
though those in upper income-brackets pay most of the federal taxes. According
to the Tax Foundation, the top 10 percent of income-earners pay 60 percent of
federal income taxes.
Faced with a Republican Congress in 1995, Clinton proposed a $500 per-child tax
credit that began to diminish at $60,000 (for a median-income, two wage-earner
family) and disappeared completely at $75,000. This is the Democrats' line of
demarcation, above which a family no longer struggles.
The Feders will just have to overcome their disappointment at not being
designated a "working family" by popping a few bottles of Dom Perignon on our
yacht as we contemplate the sunset over our palatial villa in St. Barts.
The Democrats' agenda for working families can be summed up in the phrase,
"Let them eat social programs."
They are forever ballyhooing this or that statist scheme -- subsidized child care, a
patient's "bill of rights," minimum-wage hikes, yet more money shoved down the
sinkhole of public education -- as the salvation of working families.
After 65 years of New Deals, Fair Deals, New Frontiers, Great Societies, etc., you'd
think we would have arrived at working-family nirvana, instead of a situation
where few families can get by on one paycheck.
Like the carnival hustler, we're not supposed to notice what Democrats have up
their sleeves -- taxes (now consuming 38 percent of the average family's income),
business-annihilating regulations, trade policies that export jobs and support for
quotas that deprive certain families of employment and educational opportunities
for belonging to the wrong race.
The Democrats care about "working families" -- the way timber companies care
about tree frogs. |
