By Mark Thompson
During my short stint as a college baseball player, we ran laps around the field before every practice. Being a walk-on, and one of only two African Americans on the team, I felt I had something to prove. So, I would outpace my teammates. My coach chastised me, saying, that the purpose of the drill was not to pass my teammates by, but rather to keep pace together.
President Barack Obama’s third State of the Union Address complemented his performance of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” at the Apollo Theater. The challenge this campaign season is for the electorate to stay together with him in November, and for the poor, middle class, and the wealthy to stay together economically, rather than the latter leave the rest of us behind. Also, there is always the challenge in America of staying together racially in a campaign that is that is already rife with coded language.
Meanwhile, staying together economically requires fairness in the tax code. Many of the wealthy pay lower taxes on investment income and not payroll, like Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, thereby enabling the top 1 percent of Americans to own 40 percent of our country’s wealth while the rest of us own only 7 percent. The President put it profoundly:
“When Americans talk about folks like me paying my fair share of taxes, it’s not because they envy the rich. It’s because they understand that when I get tax breaks I don’t need and the country can’t afford, it either adds to the deficit, or somebody else has to make up the difference.”