Stephan Lesher: When it comes to wealth distribution, now we are all Swedes

Both Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich talk a great deal about "American exceptionalism," which they profess to believe in, unlike, they say, President Barack Obama, or, at least, the fictional Obama they have created on the campaign trail.

That Obama, unlike the man in the White House, is either a Marxist or socialist -- depending on the day you hear the candidates bloviating -- and someone who really wants to turn America into a European country.

Of course, the program that Obama created that is supposed to be socialism -- The Affordable Care Act, or what a lot of Republicans like to call "Obamacare" -- is precisely the opposite.

It requires everyone to obtain health care from a private health care provider. Sadly, there is no public option and there is no Medicare for everyone.

And Medicare, unlike the health system in Britain, is not socialized medicine either. Medicare is simply a program that is financed by the government but in which health care is delivered privately.

The Veterans Administration operates the only socialized medicine we have in this country.

It is also the most efficient medical delivery system that we have in the country.

At any rate, it might well be that we'd all be better off if Obama really wanted to make United States into a European country.

Despite the myth of equal opportunity that Americans cherish, we don't have it here.

As recent international studies have demonstrated, it is much easier for people in most European countries -- especially in Sweden, Denmark, and Germany -- to move higher in the economic food chain, even if they have been born in relative poverty, than it is in the United States.

And when it comes to income distribution, don't ask!

In a recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, it turned out that the gap between rich and poor in countries like the United States, Israel, and Mexico is the greatest in the world -- with the earnings multiple of 14 to 1 in the U.S. and Israel, compared with about 10 to 1 in the United Kingdom, Italy, Japan, and a 6 to 1 difference in Germany and Denmark.

And as my old colleague, Charles Pankenier, pointed out on this page on Jan. 30, the income inequality gap in the United States is the greatest it has been in 95 years.

When right-wingers defend the relatively modest income taxes levied on the likes of Mitt Romney, they invariably point out that nearly half of the taxpayers paid no federal income tax last year.

The implication, of course, is that they paid no federal taxes at all. And that is a flat lie.

About 86 percent of working households pay more in payroll taxes than in federal income tax. In fact, lower and moderate income recipients pay a much larger share of their incomes in federal payroll taxes than people with high incomes do.

In 2007, the last year for which figures are available, taxpayers in the bottom 20 percent of the income scale -- that's an average income of $18,400 -- paid an average of 8.8 percent of their incomes in payroll taxes, while taxpayers in the top 1 percent of income distribution -- that's an average income of $1,137,684 -- paid an average of 1.6 percent in federal taxes.

Even presidential candidate Rick Santorum, in a rare departure from the GOP storyline, conceded in one debate that economic mobility in Europe, that is "movement up into the middle income area, is actually greater in Europe."

The conservative publication "National Review" agreed, "most Western European and English speaking nations have higher rates of mobility than the United States."

Despite the GOP's apparent horror of Obama leading us to socialism, Americans -- including Republicans -- overwhelmingly prefer Sweden to America when it comes to income distribution.

In a 2005 survey of more than 5,500 nationally representative Americans, respondents presented with unlabeled pie charts showing wealth distribution in the U.S. and Sweden, 92 perecent -- including more than 90 percent of people who voted for George W. Bush in the 2004 election -- chose the Swedish distribution while only 8 percent chose the U.S.

It turns out that Americans, like President Obama, really prefer fairness.

So while in the United States, the richest 20 percent of the people owns 84 percent of the wealth, and the poorest 20 percent lay claim to 0.3 percent of the nation's wealth, 92 percent of Americans think those numbers should be 32 percent and 10 percent respectively -- just about what they are in Sweden today.

When confronted with reality in terms of how wealth is distributed, it turns out that nearly all Americans -- not Barack Obama -- are closet socialists, or at least wannabe Swedes.

Stephan Lesher is a resident of Southbury.