It's the call of the privileged and the wannabe privileged: everyone must have proverbial skin in the proverbial game.

It's a screaming dog whistle shouted by those who live comfortable or grotesquely luxurious lives. It's said with hands on hips and chin held high. It is a respectable verse read directly from the high holy book on the cable news pundit, the respectable and thoughtful political observer who stays firmly within the lines of accepted thought, governed by those who police the status quo. These people who work for scraps and dare complain about it, they say with barely-concealed contempt, must have skin in the game. Give me your skin, working people. We must have it for our little game.

What does it mean for one to have skin in the game? Politically it means that women and men getting by on just enough to feed their families should pay their fair share of taxes. This skin game emerges when taxes and public benefits come to the forefront of the collective political mind. Think tank elites take to the airwaves to remind Americans that the wealthy pay more than half of the federal income taxes collected by the government every year. Families that make less than $50,000, meanwhile, pay about 5 percent of all federal income tax. This, we hear, is fundamentally unfair. Studied, bespectacled women and men on TV tell us so. They sound so convincing, so clean and put together. Families with low incomes, they say, must put more skin in the game.

We hear it when state legislatures or governors consider expanding government benefits like Medicaid, giving health-care access to those who go to the emergency room when their kid has a fever. The opposition to this is dependably fierce and loud: how can we give someone something without them paying for it? How can we allow access to basic health services on the taxpayers' dime? It's unconscionable. Adam Smith will emerge from his grave and kill us all (he wouldn't). There must be skin in the game. The game cannot function without the proper amount of skin.

What this demand for skin ignores, of course, is that workers pulling long hours to stay afloat in this Great Gatsby economy already give chunks of their skin to our terribly unfair, corrupt, inhumane game. Working people have toiled more and more for less and less for four decades. Most Americans can't put their hands on $500 in savings. Homelessness and hunger lurks like the Reaper over the shoulder of people who work 40 or 50 or 60 hours every week as they struggle not to thrive, but to survive. Their skin, dear cable news pundit, is very much in the game. Otherwise they'd be on the street or dead.

They have no more skin to give. Ask them. It's a game to the pundit, and to the anchor to whom she's speaking and the lawmaker prepping for the next segment and for the billionaire who funds the whole heinous charade. To the worker it's life or death. It's no game.