Recently, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has been criticizing Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) for his belief “in redistributing wealth.” “I’m not going to redistribute your wealth,” claims McCain.

However, McCain is absolutely going to redistribute wealth. He is just going to redistribute it to the already wealthy. By doubling down on the Bush tax cuts and proposing $175 billion in tax cuts for corporations, McCain’s policies will exacerbate the already astounding income inequality in the United States.

Today, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) released a report showing that “the United States has the highest inequality and poverty in the OECD after Mexico and Turkey, and the gap has increased rapidly since 2000.” The report notes that “in the United States, the richest 10 percent earn an average of US$93,000 — the highest level in the OECD. The poorest 10 percent earn an average of US$5,800 — about 20 percent lower than the OECD average.”

An analysis by the Center for American Progress Action Fund shows that President Bush’s economic policies “redistributed wealth to the richest Americans and left the majority with stagnating wages and declining household incomes.” As Scott Lilly noted today:

Based on data prepared by the Internal Revenue Service from tax returns filed during the post-9/11 recovery (2002 to 2006), household income grew by $863 billion during the period. The 15,000 families at the top of the income scale saw their annual incomes go from about $15 million a year to nearly $30 million. They alone accounted for more than 25 percent of all of the growth in income for the entire country. The remaining 1.7 million families in the top 1 percent of households accounted for nearly another 50 percent.

Currently, the United States’ income concentration is at its highest level since 1928. Meanwhile, McCain has embraced the Bush economic agenda, proposing making the Bush tax cuts permanent, a move from which the bottom 60 percent of taxpayers would only see 12 percent of the benefit. McCain’s tax plan gives no benefit to over 100 million middle class households, but does give $175 billion in tax breaks to America’s corporations.

But income inequality is cause for even more concern than the simple numbers suggest, since it also has an effect on mobility. McCain said today that “in this country, we believe in spreading opportunity.” It should give him pause, then, to note that just “7 percent of children born to parents in the bottom wealth quintile make it to the top quintile in adulthood,” and “36 percent of children born to parents in the bottom wealth quintile remain in the bottom as adults.”

OECD Secretary General Angel Gurria said that “greater income inequality stifles upward mobility between generations, making it harder for talented and hard-working people to get the rewards they deserve.”

As Matthew Yglesias wrote today:

It’s neither possible nor desirable to have complete equality of income, wealth, or opportunity. But at the same time, it’s impossible to prevent large inequalities in income and wealth from creating the kind of large inequalities in opportunity that most people, including people like McCain who are committed to making the distribution of wealth and income as unequal as possible, find undesirable.

Yesterday, during a debate with former Governor Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Sen. John Sununu (R-NH) “defended his plan for private Social Security accounts,” saying “the fact of the matter is the word privatization usually is used to scare people.” He added “I don’t believe it’s privatization if you give the youngest workers the option of saving some of their Social Security tax in an account.”

However, having workers place money into a private account – which is what Sununu proposes – absolutely amounts to privatization. And Sununu has repeatedly advocated for private Social Security accounts despite the recent fluctuations in the stock market, which would have wreaked havoc on such accounts.

In fact, earlier this month Sununu was asked if the issue of private accounts is “dead, given how scary the stock market has been?” He replied that “it shouldn’t be“:

Moderator: What do those troubles, Senator Sununu, do for the enthusiasm of an initiative that you’ve long championed, and that’s the partial voluntary privatization of social security. Is this issue now, dead, given how scary the stock market has been?

Sununu: It shouldn’t be. … And I think, allowing workers, the option of taking some of their social security taxes and putting them into an IRA or 401K plan, with oversight, with regulation, in the long term, is better for them.

However, it’s hard to argue that having money in a private account would be “better.” As an analysis by the Center on American Progress Action Fund shows, a retiree with a private Social Security account invested in stocks “would have lost approximately $26,000 if they had retired on October 1, 2008 after 35 years of contributions to such an account.”

“We should not be throwing our hard-earned Social Security benefits onto the roulette wheel of the stock market,” said John Mendolusky, president of the New Hampshire Alliance for Retired Americans. “Wall Street firms would collect the service fees and reap large windfall profits off these private accounts, while seniors in New Hampshire and across the country would take on huge risk in these already uncertain times.”

As if the effect on individual seniors wasn’t bad enough, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) concluded that privatizing social security accounts would also increase the national debt “every year for at least the next 75 years.” The CBPP also noted that “increased deficits and debt would be avoided only if Congress made very deep cuts in other programs and/or if corporate income tax receipts boomed in an unprecedented manner that is extremely unlikely to occur.”