Were you exposed to any of the annual Tax Day shriekathon by conservatives about the horrendous tax burden of wealthy Americans? Jared Bernstein has a post up at TPMCafe that nicely simplifies the games played by those who try to make this case:

[I]f you want to make our tax system sound unfair, you do two things. First, you talk only about income taxes, ignoring payroll and other sources, and second, you talk about the share of taxes paid by each income class.

The first gambit excludes the highly regressive Social Security and Medicare taxes, largely paid by the middle class. And the second avoids all sorts of alternative and better measurements of the tax burden, most especially effective tax rates and after-tax income. The one good thing that’s come out of the Bush tax agenda is that progressives, who used to avoid saying much of anything on Tax Day, now have lots to say.

Some of you may have been offended or amused by GOP presidential candidate Tommy Thompson’s gaffe before a Jewish audience the other day, wherein he allowed as how:”I’m in the private sector and for the first time in my life I’m earning money. You know that’s sort of part of the Jewish tradition.”Thompson’s hilariously counterproductive efforts to dig himself out of his use of Jewish stereotypes are one thing. As Mark Schmitt usefully noted over at TAPPED, his remarks were also offensive insofar as they implied he wasn’t actually earning his pay during his many years of public service, as compared to his recent “private sector” gigs at places like Akin, Gump, where he is presumably pulling down big bucks to show the company flag while actually running for president.But let’s take this up another notch. The other planted axiom in Thompson’s riff is an even more invidious and important one: the idea that the ability to pull down large sums of money constitutes “earning”–in the moral, not the mechanical sense–that income, implying an identity between wealth and virtue.This is indeed an attitude that’s deeply engrained in the American psyche, and that does help explain our relatively high tolerance for economic inequality. But it doesn’t survive much genuine reflection.Since we have created the largest upper class in human history, is one to deduce that the current generation of wealthy Americans is the most moral, the hardest working, the most responsible group of people to grace the planet? Does anyone really think that, say, the millions of unfortunate people who couldn’t find jobs during the Great Depression were morally inferior to, or lazier than, today’s millionaires? Probably not, yet the self-congratulation that so often accompanies such wealth accumulation, particularly when accompanied by the belief that taxation is virtually theft, seems to reflect that point of view.There’s no question that any capitalist economy is going to reward some skills and assets more than others, and create some level of inequality, and much of the western world’s economic policy debates over the last couple of centuries have revolved around prudential questions about the degree to which such inequality is necessary or incidental to the efficiency of markets.But that’s economics, not ethics, and it’s more than a little important to keep them straight. The kind of inequality this country has today may or may not be a byproduct of economic forces that we must at least respect, even if we decide to override them in the interests of a more decent society, or in the pursuit of a more stable and long-term prosperity. But there’s nothing “natural” or “moral” about vast inequality, and its tribunes must be challenged every time they try to pretend otherwise, even through the sloppy use of words like “earned.”

I wound up watching hours of the television coverage of the Blacksburg massacre yesterday, probably because I know a whole lot more about Virginia Tech than about the sites of similiar tragedies in the past. And two aspects of the “story” jumped out, particularly during and immediately after the university’s evening press conference.First was the firm stonewalling by university spokesmen on the salient facts of the tragedy, to the point of telling reporters they knew “facts” that they were unwilling to disclose for unspecified reasons. It was painfully obvious that no one before the cameras in Blacksburg had any training in crisis communications; they appeared uniformly defensive and, well, uncommunicative. I obviously don’t know what university officials were telling thousands of anxious parents at this point, but if it was no more than what they were putting out publicly, it probably wasn’t very helpful or comforting.Second, and closely related to the first, was the speed with which the media shifted the “story” from the massacre itself to suspicions that Virginia Tech horribly mishandled the situation after the initial shootings, quite possibly missing a chance to prevent or at least mitigate the subsequent shootings. This storyline clearly fed and fed on the school’s refusal to talk. And the media also jumped quickly on state officials, implicitly suggesting they should have instantly materialized in Blacksburg to take charge of the situation. (One of the realities of public higher education in this country is the carefully constructed absence of direct, hierarchical lines of authority between state officials and university operations, compounded in cases like this by fuzzy and often informal relationships among state, local and university law enforcement personnel). None of this much matters in the long run, or is of any significance as compared with the underlying tragedy. But the interactive dance of defensive, stonewalling public officials and aggressive, competition-obsessed reporters has become a depressingly regular feature of “breaking news.”

I’m doing this post because my old friend Armando at TalkLeft has cited me twice in the past week for opposing partisanship, “contrast,” and “fighting” as elements of a Democratic political strategy, once quoting, slightly (but not unfairly) out of context, something I said back in 2005.His latest post selectively quotes from an analysis I did the other day of the Democratic presidential field, noting in passing that Gore and Kerry lacked an overarching message, but had plenty of policy proposals and lots of Shrumian “fighting” rhetoric. This somehow translates, in Armando’s view, into me saying that I said Gore and Kerry’s candidacies lost because they “fought” or were too partisan. Not true. All I said is that both candidacies (and yes, I understand that Gore won the popular vote and Kerry clame close) would have benefitted from a consistent, overarching message that complemented their vast policy agendas and their “fighting” spirit. No, I do not think wanting to “fight” Republicans represents a sufficient message for any Democrat; but that doesn’t mean I’m opposed, then or now, to a strong contrast in campaign messages, so long as there is a message other than “I oppose the bad guys.” As it happens, I was as unhappy as anybody with the weird, poll-driven reluctance of the Kerry campaign during the 2004 convention to attack the opposition; I was in the convention speechwriting operation, and chafed against the High Command’s edict that speeches barely mention Bush and rarely mention the GOP. As Armando suggests, the Kerry campaign got out of that mindset later in the campaign, and I’m glad they did. As for the “politics of contrast,” which Armando has repeatedly used me as a foil to promote, yes, of course, absolutely, if you don’t explain to voters why you’re different from the opposition, you can’t expect to win many elections. But just as obviously, there are legitimate questions about where to draw contrasts, and how much contrast is necessary. If contrast is the only thing that matters, then Democrats should just distance themselves as far from Republicans as possible, regardless of public opinion, principles, actual consequences, or common sense, and I doubt Armando or anyone else really thinks that makes any sense. He has his point of view about how far Democrats need to go to “contrast” themselves with the GOP on Iraq, but that point of view, however passionately and articulately advanced, is just a debating point between people who agree on the basics, not a self-evident position held by anyone who wants “contrast.” So don’t count me among the (largely imaginary) ranks of Democrats who never want to be partisan, don’t want to draw contrasts, and don’t want to fight. I continue to think we need a broader message that appeals to people who aren’t reflexively ideological or partisan, and I reject the idea that Bill Clinton (for example), wasn’t acting as a partisan politician when he talked about “progress not partisanship” in 1996 and 1998. Partisanship, contrast and “fighting” do need to be connected to a broader national agenda and a rationale for Democratic candidacies that transcends these tactics, and that’s all I’ve tried to say.