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The Beat Goes On
By David Glenn Cox
Last week I wrote about former Clinton Chief of Staff and co-transition Chairman John Podesta who floated the idea of a Value Added Tax. This week the idea was brought up again by none other than Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. In Washington this is called a trial balloon, run it up the flagpole and see who salutes or shoots at it, whatever the case may be.
The Value Added Tax has been the darling of the far right wing for a generation; it is a part of their flat tax scenario. Their twisted logic is as follows: you only pay taxes when you purchase something, and since wealthy people have more money, they will pay more taxes. Except…except that as a percentage of their income the tax falls the hardest on those with the least. It puts you and John McCain in the same tax bracket, you and Nancy Pelosi in the same tax bracket.
It’s not that they are bad people, it is that they are ignorant people. They are ignorant of the world in which most of us live. Our senators and congress people are for the most part multimillionaires. John Kerry has a net worth estimated at over $200 million, and when Kerry was a returning Vietnam vet with only a few coins in his pocket he passionately pleaded with Congress to discontinue the Vietnam War. Now Kerry feels differently, co-authoring legislation to expand US efforts in Pakistan to the tune of seven and half billion dollars.
Nancy Pelosi is worth over $25 million and so doesn’t feel that a value-added tax would be such a bad thing after all. Just as they don’t understand your world, most of us don’t understand theirs. When you have a net worth of $25 million, you just buy whatever you want. These people don’t sit in the dealership waiting for their credit to be approved. They pick out the car they want and write a check. Bob and Elizabeth Dole list a money market and checking account containing over one million dollars. How’s that compare to your checking account?
They don’t clean the house; they don’t wash cars or mow the lawn. Many of them don’t even drive cars. They have a limo to pick them up and take them wherever they want to go. John McCain was criticized during the Presidential campaign for not knowing how many homes he owned. McCain would not be alone; Richard Shelby of Alabama owns medical buildings and a home in Tuscaloosa valued at over one million dollars. Alabama real estate is not California real estate; a one million-dollar home in Tuscaloosa is a pretty nice spread.
If you hold assets worth $25 million and manage just a 5% return on investments, that’s $1.25 million annually. Guess what, you don’t pay value-added taxes on investments. As Cartman would say, “Sweet!”
It’s not class warfare as much as it's class identification; they don’t live in your world and you don’t live in theirs. It’s no wonder that Barack Obama gets treated so badly on Capitol Hill. With a net worth under a million dollars even he doesn’t travel in their circles. An exclusive retreat in Colorado required members to have a net worth in excess of $25 million before they could apply for membership. Bill Clinton was granted a special dispensation because he was a former President. Now Clinton can enter on his own power, having a net worth of over $30 million.
I’m not exempting the Republicans. When they were in power I said the same about them when they tried to pass regressive taxes on working people. I recently took Megan McCain to task for lamenting about how hard it was to be Megan McCain. She graduated from Columbia two years ago, and had she not been the daughter of a multimillionaire senator would she have ever been admitted in the first place? Do you think she gets nasty letters wanting payment of her student loans? There are no loans, there are no financial aid forms to fill out. Daddy or his accountant just writes the check.
When George W. Bush found yet another oil company flat broke he didn’t pick up the want ads. He bought a job as the managing partner of the Texas Rangers. His name recognition was all the qualification he needed. It didn’t matter that he knew less about baseball than he did about the oil business, he was his daddy's namesake and that was good enough.
Close your eyes and try to imagine, a million dollars in your checking account and all your homes paid for and anything you want just a phone call away. Your parties are catered and for fun you fly to Hawaii for the weekend. You go skiing in Aspen and watch the Super Bowl from a skybox. Like Condi Rice you go shopping for shoes in New York and you try to keep it under twenty thousand dollars.
It’s no wonder that they can’t understand why people would be upset that you would vote to limit insurance company liability to 65%. They think, “Why the hell don’t you just pay the rest yourself?” That’s why House whip Eric Canter is such a staunch opponent of student loans. His mommy and daddy paid for his college tuition and he thinks that yours should too. Now he’s in favor of vouchers so that people can choose to send their children to private schools. But don’t you think for a second that your kids could get into the private schools he attended. Not even if they could play football.
Theirs is a pampered life of leisure; they live to work, they don’t work to live. They don’t worry about retirement or whether the roof will start leaking again or if the old furnace will make it through the winter. They never have to worry about buying the kids clothes for the school year or what they will do if their child gets sick. They’ve got health insurance and don’t drive clunkers and so don’t need cash for them.
Mileage is a meaningless term, as is coach. They don’t shop for groceries; they send someone to shop and get what’s on the list because money is no object and never was any object. They don’t work for you because they don’t understand you or your little problems. Chronic depression? Go to the emergency room. Lose your house? Gee, that’s tough but capitalism’s not perfect.
We are locked out of our government like we are locked out of the private schools. It takes millions of dollars to get elected and they’ve always got more, and friends that have more. As Harry Truman said, “They like the government so much they want to buy it!” Now they own it and we’re left shivering in the snow because they are utterly clueless to the plight of working Americans.
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