Democrats find their bogeyman

Democrats' flagship campaign theme for Nov. 2012 has emerged in full force in recent weeks.

It's this: Behind all our nation's economic problems -- from abysmal unemployment numbers to sky-high deficits -- lurks a greedy businessman.

This guy is ruining things for the rest of us. He refuses to play by the rules, and lives in luxury while "the 99 percent" suffer.

Who's facilitating his misdeeds? Unprincipled Republicans, who fawningly enable the machinations of their "tax-cut-at-any-price" masters in the private sector.

This message -- now rising from many "progressive" quarters -- is a far cry from "the politics of hope" that dominated the last presidential campaign.

Democrats' businessman-as-bogeyman theme takes a variety of forms. We can see them on display in recent remarks by three of its champions: President Obama; Elizabeth Warren, who's challenging Scott Brown for a U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts, and Minnesota's own Gov. Mark Dayton.

Obama's need to finger businesspeople for America's economic plight is clear. In his first year as president, though he blamed George W. Bush for the nation's economic downturn, Obama assured us his own progressive policies would soon put things right and guarantee a shining future.

So Obama has turned to Plan B. To divert attention from his own failed policies, he's conjured up a hobgoblin.

In his recent speech at Osawatomie, Kan., the president fired a salvo in his new class-warfare campaign: The top 1 percent must stop cheating the rest of us and pay their "fair share." The "breathtaking greed of a few" is destroying the middle class.

While Obama's goal is to divert attention from his own failures, Warren offers a different flavor of "us vs. them" politics. In her world, the wealthy are not so much greedy cheaters as ungrateful dependents on a government funded by the middle class.

Here is her now-famous rallying cry:

"There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there -- good for you." But "you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate," and "you were safe" because of police "the rest of us paid for."

The fact is, however, that most of us owe our jobs (and our ability to pay taxes) to a small minority of Americans who created those jobs -- and who started the enterprises that power our economy.

Moreover, Minnesota businesses pay twice as much in state and local taxes as they receive in government benefits, according to Ernst & Young.

In terms of federal, state and local taxes, an average American household in the top 20 percent of income pays twice the tax rate and about 18 times the dollars in tax payments of a household in the bottom 20 percent. In 2009, at the federal level, the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid 37 percent of income taxes and earned 17 percent of adjusted gross income.

It's more accurate to say, then, that the factory owner not only built his factory and created jobs, but financed a disproportionate share of the infrastructure and government services that his fellow citizens enjoy.

Dayton may be the most interesting of the three "soak the rich" standard bearers. He doesn't assert that the rich cause the miseries of the rest of us. After all, Minnesota's economy is doing fairly well. And unlike many other states, Minnesota currently forecasts a small budget surplus.

His fervor calls to mind his original 2011 plan to boost the top marginal rate on "the rich" -- defined as individuals earning more than $85,000 in taxable income and couples earning more than $150,000 -- to 10.95 percent: one of the highest rates in the nation.

Dayton's call to soak the rich doesn't seem to be an election strategy. He's not up for election, and may not run again.

Instead, he seems to view a tax increase on better-off Minnesotans as a moral imperative, a good in itself. Perhaps it springs from a desire to atone for his own privileged background, and the inherited wealth he exerted no effort to earn.

It's anyone's guess whether the Obama/Warren/Dayton message will fly with a deeply divided and depressed electorate.

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