THE war of words between US presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama for the votes of plumbers and other average Joes is a reminder of the nation's long-standing doubts about concentrated wealth – and its qualms about doing something about it.
Americans have long voiced concerns about putting too much wealth in too few hands, but the public's views also come with contradictions – there is concern also about the role of government and the individual.
"I think that when you spread the we
alth around, it's good for everybody," Mr Obama told Ohio voter Joe Wurzelbacher – aka "Joe the Plumber".
The remark may have sounded pretty innocuous. But Mr McCain has lambasted his rival's words as sounding "a lot like socialism", and turned the criticism into a central theme of his campaign's final round. Mr Obama's remarks, Mr McCain says, are emblematic of a tax plan to confiscate wealth and give it to the poor that would make the IRS – America's tax service – "into a giant welfare agency".
A substantial majority of Americans say the rich don't pay their fair share of taxes, opinion polls show. A growing number say the US is becoming a nation of haves and have-nots.
The top one-tenth of US households now earn an average of 11.2 times what those in the bottom tenth make, according to the Census Bureau, up from a ratio of 8.7 three decades ago.
The wealthiest one-fifth of US households now take in 50 per cent of all income, up from 44 per cent in 1977 and the differences are even more pronounced in analyses of incomes for the top 1 per cent of households.
But Americans are divided on whether government should be heavily taxing the rich in order to benefit those with less.
In a poll in April, 51 per cent said they support "heavy taxes" on the rich to redistribute wealth. That is significantly higher than when the same question was asked in 1939, at the tail end of the Great Depression, when 35 per cent agreed. But support for higher taxes on the wealthy is tempered by individuals' aspirations.
Dennis Jacobe, chief economist for polling group Gallup, said: "Most Americans hope to some day be wealthy and, as a result, the idea of kind of redistributing income is not as popular as (government policies resulting in] making a bigger pie so everybody does better."
The tension between those ideas runs through American politics in ways that do not always seem logical – even many wealthy people support higher taxes on the rich.
In a country that believes in itself as a place where anybody who works hard enough can make it, though, there is a certain wariness of taxes that might discourage hard work.
The full article contains 473 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
