Monday, October 01, 2012

Skin In The Game


 To have skin in the game is to be invested in the scheme, or to have money at stake in some endeavor; to have a vested interest in some outcome. I bring this up because I found it to be an interesting choice of idioms for Chris Christie to be tossing about yesterday on all the chat shows. The idiom is derived from the slang "Skin" meaning "Dollar Bill."

On ABC, CBS, and NBC's morning political chat shows Mr. Christie was repeatedly said that the point of Mr. Romney's tax plans was to assure that every American had "skin in the game." This was his rational for supporting the tax rate cuts that the Romney-Ryan plan would bring into being.

Forget for the fact that he never addressed how cutting taxes by over eight billion dollars would do anything to reduce the deficit; he kept saying that by cutting the tax rate for the top 1-2% of all Americans we were somehow getting all Americans some skin in the game.

If everybody really had skin in the game then everybody would benefit from the economy when it was good and would suffer when it was bad. The problem with the ever-expanding divide between the top and the bottom of the scale is that it has obliterated this particular facet of the whole "skin in the game" fallacy. By vesting all of the benefits of the good economy in the super wealthy and lading the lowest factions of the workforce with responsibility for maintaining the production that drives the economy you essentially insulate the super wealthy from the bad impacts of a downturn while giving them the boon of an upturn.

This is essentially the opposite of the whole "skin in the game" concept. The super wealthy have no skin in the game! This is yet another attempt to justify the whole disproved trickle-down concept. Don't fall for it!

Wherever you are today I hope that you have skin in the game and that you will benefit from it!

Don Bergquist – October 01, 2012 – Lakewood, Colorado, USA

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