Indianapolis Star cartoonist Gary Varvel depicts Obama as Robin Hood at the State of the Union address (reprinted by USA Today, 1/21/15)
There was one metaphor that seemed irresistible in commentary on Barack Obama’s State of the Union address. Here it is on CNN.com (1/21/15):
At the heart of his message is a Robin Hood-style plan to raise taxes on wealthy Americans’ investments and financial institutions and use that money to foot the bill for free community college tuition and new tax credits for child care and two-worker households.
Likewise, Slate (1/20/15) wrote of
the political intent behind this Robin Hood approach: forcing Republicans who oppose the president’s agenda to defend the wealthy at a time when a vast majority of the public already thinks the economic system is tilted in favor of the wealthy.
“Obama Plays Robin Hood,” declared a headline in The Hill (1/19/15). Politico (1/18/15) told us “Five Things About Barack Obama’s Robin Hood Tax Plan.” Fox News (1/20/15) put the headline “‘Robin Hood’ Obama Taunts Republicans” over a column by the Washington Post’s Marc Thiessen (that never mentions the Sherwood outlaw).
It sort of kills the joke when you spell it out like that.
So what’s wrong with a little folkloric allusion? Well, aside from implying that taxation is a form of “stealing”–and aside from the fact that it’s a popular theme in racist caricatures of Obama–it gives the president too much credit.
The State of the Union tax proposals are said to raise $320 billion over 10 years, which is to say $32 billion a year–or a little less than 1 percent of federal outlays for 2013, which were $3.45 trillion. Total personal income in the United States in 2012 was $13.4 trillion, with about $2.6 trillion of that going to the top 1 percent.
So in Obama’s proposal, offered more as a what-if dream than as a concrete agenda he expects to see enacted by Congress, the wealthiest 1 percent would give up a little more than 1 percent of their income–after seeing their share of income more than double since 1980. All in all, it’s a shift of 0.2 percent of US personal income.
You call that stealing from the rich to give to the poor? I call it Sheriff of Nottingham Lite.
