In a national radio address on February 23, 1934, Huey Long unveiled his "Share Our Wealth" plan, a program designed to provide a decent standard of living to all Americans by spreading the nation's wealth among the people.
Long proposed capping personal fortunes at $50 million each (roughly $600 million in today's dollars) through a restructured, progressive federal tax code and sharing the resulting revenue with the public through government benefits and public works. In subsequent speeches and writings, he revised his graduated tax levy on wealth over $1 million to cap fortunes at $5 - $8 million (or $60 - $96 million today).
Sound good? I'd say so. Sound like an agenda that would work for Occupy Wall Street? I'd say so.
There is a long and storied U.S. history of populist uprisings with social justice messages for tough economic times: from the 1776 Declaration of Independence : "When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them..." to 1895 and William Jennings Bryan's Cross of Gold speech: "The man who is employed for wages is as much a businessman as his employer..." "to today.
But no-one has made the American economic justice case better than Louisiana Governor and U.S. Senator Huey Long, a rabble-rousing dictator in some people's view, but, in mine, a singularly valuable advocate for "ordinary Americans," whose agenda the Zucotti Park residents (as well as the rest of us social justice advocates) would do well to adopt.
Coming into his political adulthood at a time when Standard Oil, a predecessor company to BP, was running rough-shod in Louisiana (sound familiar?), Long's first big public fight was for "ordinary Americans" and against "Big Oil."
Fighting hard, Long made the point that the company should pay its fair share of taxes (sound familiar?). While Long lost the first round of his fight, as well as the second, (when he was a member of the state's oil-company regulator, the Public Service Commission), as governor he won and applied the taxes Standard Oil paid to funding education for ordinary Louisianans.
Later, preparing to run for President, Long developed the Share Our Wealth program described above.
I confess that more than once in the last couple terrible years I've blogged about this solution of Huey Long's to our ghastly economic problems. I repeat here an ever-so-apt remark Long made about the need for it:
The same mill that grinds out the extra rich is the same mill that will grind out the extra poor, because, in order that the extra rich can become so affluent, they must necessarily take more of what ordinarily would belong to the average man.
Just read the Share Our Wealth platform. It really does read like an agenda just right for Occupy Wall Street:
- Cap personal fortunes at50 million each -- equivalent to about600 million today (later reduced to5 -8 million, or60 -96 million today)
- Limit annual income to one million dollars each (about12 million today)
- Limit inheritances to five million dollars each (about60 million today)
- Guarantee every family an annual income of2,000 (or one-third the national average)
- Free college education and vocational training
- Old-age pensions for all persons over 60
- Veterans benefits and healthcare
- A 30 hour work week
- A four week vacation for every worker
- Greater regulation of commodity production to stabilize prices.
Subsequently, Long recommended: "......a debt moratorium to give struggling families time to pay their mortgages and other debts before losing their property to creditors." Sound familiar? Sound right? I'd say so.
Here's how the great Louisiana-born singer Randy Newman summed-it-all-up (thanks to steadfast political girl Kit Duffy for bringing this to my attention). Take a careful listen, please, and then act-up.
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In the early 30s, many outside of Louisiana became captivated by Long, whose colorful oratory, and promises of "every man a king" resonated with the poor during this Great Depression Era..Promising a redistribution of wealth through a plan of economic and social reform called "Share Our Wealth," Long envisioned himself as president.
http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/hueylong/educators/
Huey Long did not suffer from excessive modesty. A high-school dropout who taught himself law and got a law degree in only one year of study, Long was confident he would become President of the United States in 1936. So confident was he that he wrote a book entitled My First Days in the White House in which he named his cabinet (including President Roosevelt as Secretary of the Navy and President Hoover as Secretary of Commerce) and in which he conducted long imaginary conversations with FDR and Hoover designed to humiliate them and show their subservience to the boy from the piney woods of Louisiana.
http://www.ssa.gov/history/huey.html
Their individual averages were as follows: Mary-A, James-C, Larry-B, Sally-F.
But they went to Huey Long High School, so they all got a C+.
Of course, real life doesn't remotely resemble a fable. It includes inequality of opportunity, inequality of wealth, rabid ideologues who love inequality (and even greed), just for starters. And it includes no schools that actually award C+ to everybody--although, by awarding no grades at all, some home schools admittedly come close.
If, instead of entering Harvard Law School and becoming a community activist, Obama had decided to enter Harvard Business School and become a financial whiz would you advocate penalizing his success?
The issue is far, far more complicated than the OWS protestors are making it sound. At what point, if their adolescent demands were actually enacted, do you thing business would emigrate from America in greater numbers than it is already?
What we are dealing with at the moment is strictly the law of supply and demand. There are few jobs and vast numbers of workers. It is an employers' market. Protestors occupying anything will not change the basic facts on the ground.
A useful thing to remember about Huey Long was that when he was accused of being a "socialist" or a "communist," he told everyone that he got his ideas from the Bible, which instructs people to help the poor.
I'm not sure that would work today but, there's really no reason why it shouldn't.
If the "Socialist" or Communist" shoes fits, then advocates of this plan should wear it and stop trying to pretend that the seizing of one's wealth and it's redistribution to someone else is a tenant of Christianity. The Bible never advocated that governement do all of the things that Long's plan advocates. It pressed individuals to make those decisions to use their own resources to help others ..... that indiviuald responsibility thing that OWS doesn't like to talk about.
What was on the table was leaving accumulated wealth intact, but avoiding further distribution up (at a poverty-generating clip) by merely resuming historical income tax rates. Against their own interests, however, by fighting tooth and nail against even that modest level of fairness and show of social concern, the superrich are now flirting with a greatly more far-reaching assault on their privileged status. "Good luck" is no longer required for us 99%ers--members of average working families--to re-establish the less-tilted playing field of the late 20th century, which enabled the American Middle Class to exist and grow: the political momentum has already shifted. The golden goose for the few is about to die at the hands of the few, themselves. They simply grew too greedy for their own good--let alone our country's. They'd have done well to cede the short yardage on taxes, but now risk losing the game entirely, along the lines of Huey Long's rhetoric. It will, however, be the free market in action: it was their choice to make.
Tell it to Obama, Wall Street's best friend. He's the guy who signed the extension of the Bush Tax Cuts into law, lest you've forgotten.
Otherwise known as the big 21% of liberals in this country, claiming to speak for 99% of Americans despite only 22% of Americans approving of OWS-ers' goals (Gallup). Gee, that 22% is awfully close to 21%. You liberals couldn't possibly be speaking only for yourselves, could ya?
As for a return to the odious tax rates of the '50s, '60s, and '70s: no man who is forced to forfeit more of the fruits of his labor than he keeps for himself is a free man.
These cries of "fairness," are nothing more than the less-productive or unproductive seeking to use the law to subject the more productive to economic slavery.
" equality of rights under a limited government is possible and an essential condition of individual freedom"
The tax codes and the insider trading make it so that the wealthy are MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS...to paraphrase "1984" Taxing Capital Gains at less than Income is the elite's way of reducing income taxes. Capping Social Security earnings is another. Calling Corporate taxes as payments by the wealthy is another...CORPORATIONS ONLY COLLECT TAXES, disproportionately paid by the not so wealthy! Then they "pay" the collected money to the government after they spent as much as possible on their own quality of life.
P.S. the original justification for taxing capital gains at a lower amount was not only to stimulate investment, but also to compensate people for LONG TERM deflation of their assets due to inflation. In other words, if you invested a dollar in 1970 and sold the asset in 2010 for three dollars, much of the increase, if not all was lost to inflation. HOWEVER, assets that are held for only one year at today's interest rates certainly don't qualify, and the corporations certainly aren't stimulating anything but their bottom lines by repurchasing stock options.
Really? The tax rates during the growth years during which many of today's largest private fortunes were created or inherited were "odious"? What, exactly, was odious? The results for the rich? The general well-being and economic growth that average Americans experienced during most of those years?
Also, what is "productive" about inherited wealth or passive earnings? What that's "unproductive" is reflected in the statistics of the '50's, '60's, and '70's, which document a general increase in the productivity of America's wage-earners? Today's melodramatic outrage over tax rates seems always to be based on rigid, abstract ideology and spurious, rewritten history--seldom on fact. The fact is that 1950-1979 were pretty good times for millions of Americans.
And, instructive.
Because, what happens when existing power is challenged - people get killed.
As did Huey Long.