The party of ‘working families’?

For as long as I can remember, elected Democrats everywhere have claimed to be devout defenders of “working families.”

President Obama himself used the catch phrase time and again last weekend in Massachusetts to champion Martha Coakley’s doomed Senate campaign.

It’s a clever and seductive talking point, implying loyalty to anyone who grinds out each week to put food on the table while de-emphasizing the party’s allegiance to the welfare state. And yet, by pitting “working families” against “the rich” in stump speeches, commercials and campaign mailers, the label allows Democrats to remain true to the party’s class-warfare agenda.

Republican Scott Brown was hammered by the Coakley campaign as someone who’d side with greedy bankers over the common man. Massachusetts voters didn’t buy it. They handed him a stunning victory over the phony Coakley in Tuesday’s special election.

Brown’s win delivered all kinds of messages to the political establishment: start over on health care reform; stop pumping up the federal debt; govern from the middle, not the fringes. But as much as anything, it was a repudiation of the idea that Democrats are looking out for “working families.” On the contrary, the electorate saw Coakley as the decisive vote for a business-bashing, government-growing, union-spooning, tax-hiking, job-killing Democratic supermajority.

It’s about time.

I’ve never understood why Democrats have been allowed to run with the “working families” slogan unchecked for so long.

Essentially, Democrats for years have been implying that “the rich” don’t really work. Regardless of your education, experience and productivity, at some point income clearly isn’t earned or deserved, so it must be redistributed through taxation to “working families.”

Now consider all the sectors of the economy that Democrats openly despise and target for punishment. The financial sector is the left’s favorite whipping boy these days. If you’re employed by a bank, lender or brokerage, sorry, you’re not a “working family.” Same goes for insurance employees. If you work in the corporate offices or upper management of any taxpaying business, it goes without saying that you’re not part of a “working family.”

We can’t forget the Democratic Party’s environmentalist wing, which wants to impose carbon taxes and place drastic restrictions on energy consumption and emissions. That means the millions upon millions of Americans who work for oil, mining and coal companies, not to mention the industries they power, will have to give up their careers to save the planet from global warming.

The list goes on and on. Commercial and large-scale residential developers. Nuclear power workers. Off-road vehicle manufacturers and sellers. Democrats don’t like your jobs.

It’s beyond crazy to display such hostility toward so many professions when so many Americans are out of work.

Outside of job titles, what is the income threshold that separates “working families” from “the rich”? That’s a question I’ve asked most every Democratic candidate for state or federal office over the past several years. To date, no one has given me a precise answer.

The Senate’s version of health care legislation offers some clues, however. One of the most family-unfriendly provisions of that bill is the new “marriage penalty” it imposes as part of the mandate that all Americans buy health insurance.

For example, two middle-class workers who live together and earn annual salaries of about $35,000 but lack health coverage would be eligible for government subsidies to help pay for their insurance policies. As long as they remain singles, their insurance premiums would be capped at about $3,600 per year each, according to the Congressional Budget Office. But if those two get married, they not only lose their eligibility for subsidies, their annual premium cap rises to more than $13,000. That’s a marriage penalty of almost $6,000 — and one heck of an incentive to stay single and have kids out of wedlock.

The CBO reports that a marriage penalty exists across all incomes under the Senate plan, but the legislation hits households with incomes of at least $50,000 the hardest.

So if you and your spouse make a combined $50,000 per year, you’re “rich” enough to help cover someone else’s health insurance bill.

And Democrats would have us believe this monster, concocted in secret under the guidance of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, is an example of “looking out for working families”?

Forcing Americans to overpay for pre-paid health care isn’t going to help this country return to economic growth. Neither will any cap-and-trade scheme or another debt-growing “stimulus.” Instead of raising costs, boosting taxes and transferring wealth, Congress should be figuring out ways to reduce costs, cut taxes and let people keep more of their own money.

That’s a path to job creation. That’s what “working families” need.

We won’t get it from the bunch currently in charge of Washington. Massachusetts figured it out.

Glenn Cook (gcook@reviewjournal.com) is a Review-Journal editorial writer.