Is Obama this Depression's Huey Long?

October 18th, 2008 Saturday morning

Is there a storm on the horizon, another election that some feel is rigged? We'll find out soon. I hope not, I hope Obama wins by a landslide. It's his election to lose.

The last debate is over. Obama the calm winner, McCain the frantic, desperate, rattled old man whose time has come and gone. When he blustered, "Joe, you're rich!" in an angry response to Obama's logical explanation of his health plan, I thought, that's it, McCain has lost the undecided, because I for one couldn't understand his comment and I was weary of trying. Every time McCain said we needed change, that the country was hurting, he offered nothing but more of Bush's tax cuts for the super wealthy and it seemed to emphasize the need to elect Obama.

The benefit of Bush's tax cuts has not helped the average American. Maybe if everyone in Ohio for example was engaged in luxury boat building for the super rich, or personal massage or owned a $15,000 a night hotel suite on the Riviera, then Bush's wealth dripping down from the top economics might actually employ some people in Ohio! But from what I can see, the super wealthy have made sure that the smallest amount of money possible leaks out of their wallets.

Who are these super wealthy who benefited so much from Bush's tenure? I recall a dinner where Bush looked out on his audience and said, "Gathered tonight are the haves... and the have mores!"

Well, he was right, sadly, this one room full of several hundred people probably owned more assets than the other several million of the people in the town combined!

Huey Long was elected Governor of Louisiana in 1928. He campaigned on a platform of share the wealth, and coined the phrase, "Every man a king, but no one wears a crown." In one of his most famous speeches, delivered in 1934, which was called Every Man a King, he observed,

"Now, my friends, if you were off on an island where there were 100 lunches, you could not let one man eat up the hundred lunches, or take the hundred lunches and not let anybody else eat any of them. If you did, there would not be anything else for the balance of the people to consume." (http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/hueyplongking.htm and for more on Huey Long, http://www.hueylong.com/index.php).

His philosophy holds as true today as it did then, but our perspective has expanded, we don't need to imagine ourselves on an island, for we all know that we are on Spaceship Earth, an island of warmth and light in a vacuum of vast, endless space.
Our island is the whole planet, and those people on the island now represent the six plus billion people who live here. Yet the problem still remains, we are still letting a few people eat all the lunches, and even worse, pass those lunches on from generation to generation, so that we end up with the Paris Hilton's of the world who are "famous for being famous"!

The super wealthy, the "have mores" as Bush described them, have been able to do this because they are very clever at hiding among the masses, at putting their own political identities in with those of the aspiring small business person of America, so that when we discuss capitalism and free markets, we end up with inheritance taxes as an example, in which the average business owner or rancher is dead set against a high inheritance tax rate, and the same rate is then applied to the "have mores" as well.

Now I totally agree that a family farm worth even $50 million should be passed on with no inheritance tax at all. A $50 million estate is not that large any more. What we need to do though, is to separate the "have mores", the people with 100 lunches in Huey Long's terms, from the rest of us, and have a high inheritance tax that does not even get imposed until one reaches some level like $50 million, (adjusted for inflation each year).

While not taxing an estate until it is worth $50 million, remember that while a person with a net worth of $50 million is 1,000 times wealthier than a person has with an estate of $50,000, Bill Gates with a fortune of $50 billion is an astounding 1,000 times wealthier than the person with the $50 million fortune. And to his credit, Bill Gates feels that the inheritance tax he pays should be far higher than the one on the books now.

Estate taxes are only one area where the "have mores" are not sharing their lunches because they are hiding among the common man's laws. Take minimum wage for example. When I was 18, it was roughly $2 an hour. It cost $4 a day to ski at Mt. Bachelor. Now, the highest minimum wage in the country is in Oregon and it will be close to $8 an hour, yet Mt. Bachelor now charges almost $80 a day to ski! Minimum wages have gone up four fold since 1966, while prices have gone up 20 fold! The have mores definitely benefit when they can hire labor for less than $8 an hour. If minimum wage had gone up with inflation, it would now cost $40 an hour, a living wage, to hire a gardener.

If Obama is elected, his tax plan, increasing taxes on incomes over $250,000, while lowering on those below, will be a wonderful beginning at legally separating the economic fate of the have mores from the rest of us on the island that are frankly, in need of some lunches! He plans to increase minimum wage to $10 an hour, and I just hope that it indexes higher each year with inflation.

Is Obama another Huey Long? I think in his heart, he is, but his rhetoric is not that of Every Man a King. Instead it is more balanced and deals in concepts such as bringing jobs back to America, a medical plan for all. The have mores are going to have to give up a little by paying more taxes, but it is going to help all of us a lot. And in the end, that's a good thing for the have mores, I'm sure that Louis 14th would have gladly given up some of his fortune to avoid his fate.

I just hope that Obama takes a lesson from Huey Long's life and takes a slow and careful path in making his changes. Huey Long was one of the most popular men in America, and would have probably become President in 1936, yet he fell to an assasin's bullet. The have mores don't take kindly to the rest of us trying to improve our lot.