Tuesday, October 30, 2001

Upper class pays its dues
Criticism of rich for not giving more to charities unfair
Commentary by Tim Dragga

I write this in part as a response to fellow writers who have been critical of people, particularly those in the upper class, for not giving more to charity organizations.

Now, it’s very tempting to deride Bill Gates for not dropping more than $20 million on charity. As I see it, he ripped off Apple to produce an operating system full of bugs, so it’s easy to see how he owes us all something.

Liberals can point out how rich the upper class is and how much more they should be giving back to the community, and then pat themselves on the back for having such scruples.

The rich are easy targets. Let’s face it — it’s hard to justify the second Benz when people living in the country don’t get enough food.

But let’s also be honest about something else. The top 1 percent of this country pays for 20 percent of this country through taxes. Now this is, of course, the way it has to be.

Without getting into the technicalities of distributive justice, it’s easy to understand that no one succeeds independent of the society in which they live. If you have met with any success at all, it is due in part to the society that the government provides for you and the good luck you have in that your particular society values the skills you happen to possess.

For example: It’s not really John Smith’s fault he was born into a lower-income family and only has a talent for drywall and landscaping. If he’d been given the choice he’d have probably rather been born a Kennedy with the career of “rock star” but it just wasn’t in his cards.

It’s not necessarily John’s fault he’s not netting six figures a year. He can’t fully be held responsible that society doesn’t value the ability to put up drywall the same way it does being able to put an inflated ball through an iron hoop suspend approximately 10 feet above the ground.

If a person didn’t know anything about the society he was going to enter and had to make a blind guess about whether it would be a more valuable skill to build a house or put a ball through a hoop, he would probably pick drywall.

By this same token, a person really can’t claim that it isn’t simply his good fortune that he happened to be born into a middle-upper class family and have a skill society just so happens to value.

It therefore isn’t unreasonable to ask that those who gain the most out of society be called upon to give the most back.

It is in everyone’s interest that each person have an opportunity for education, that each person gets some semblance of health care, that each person has police to protect him and his possessions and that each person has a basic minimum quality of life.

That said, just because someone falls in the 39.9 percent tax bracket doesn’t mean that his water runs twice as hot, or the police come to his house an extra 14 times a month.

I’m not saying they shouldn’t be paying that 39.9 percent, they most certainly should, but attacking the rich for not giving enough to charity is not an educated assessment of the current society.

The programs in this country that help the people who have the least survive on the backs of those who have the most.

This isn’t to say that people who have been fortunate are absolved from giving to charity. But it lacks class to disparage them for not giving enough. The upper class supports a large proportion of this country; we shouldn’t slap them in the face as they do so.

Tim Dragga is a junior political science major from Lubbock. He can be contacted at (t.c.dragga@student.tcu.edu).