From a Letter to Kay
This letter originally began with a list of taxation stats, reportedly from the IRS website (no, I haven’t checked – just vet my numbers yourselves – I’ve spent too much time writing this when grades are due next week). But I got them from a newsletter my dad forwards to me, and I’m not supposed to forward it to anyone else, so I’ll just leave the one number in that’s in the body of the paragraph, except to say that the bottom 50% pay around 3% of our taxes. Comparatively overtaxed they are not.
Anyway, here begins the letter, without indentation, both because Blogger’s indentation is ridiculously edit-intensive if one wants it to look other than plain stupid, and because the letter constitutes is the rest of the post. The letter, except for the now-missing list, was never sent to my wife (listening to U2 tunes on the computer two rooms over – probably watching the videos on YouTube, if I know her, and I do); I figured she can just read it here, if she wants to:
The demonization the rich have undergone in this country is mind-boggling. All you have to make, to be part of the so-called “super-rich,” the fabled 1%, is under $370,000 a year. Now granted, that’s awfully nice, but it’s not Gossip Girl country. When I grew up, my dad made in the $100k to $150k range, probably not that far different from the one-percenters at the bottom of that bracket today. Our life was very nice, but it wasn’t blowing people out of the water. We had three bedrooms in a safe, attractive suburb with good schools; we had one TV; we had one car; we did our own yard work; our most expensive pieces of art were chalk portraits of the kids and a few ivory pieces bought by my dad while on business in Singapore; we drove a series of station wagons (we did have a 1929 Model A parked in the garage, doing nothing; it sold for $10,000 in the mid- to late-nineties); we traveled by car and second-class plane, and our hotels ranged from Motel 6 to Holiday Inn.
The family business almost failed a few times in turbulent market conditions, and might have done so had it not been for the money my dad’s brother had made in the markets and plowed back into the company. Had his brother been soaked by the government because he owed it to the nation, because it was “patriotic” to give (cf. Joe Biden – who’s never shown any evidence of checking the voluntary giving box that appears on all our tax returns), he would not have been able to risk his savings on the business, the business might not have survived, and 10, 20, 50 people (not sure how many were employed at the time) would have lost their jobs, and a family-owned and -operated company that employed over 200 by the mid-2000’s would have ceased to exist. We maybe weren’t in the top 1%, but we were probably in the top 5%, or at the very least the top 10%, and my grandfather, father, and uncle were living productive lives, giving employment to people who needed and benefitted from the jobs run by honest, responsible men, and giving a service to investors and farmers who benefitted from working with honest, responsible men.
It has historically been, for fifty years, the contention of your [Kay’s] party [the Democrats], and increasingly seems to be the contention of mine, that the rich are to blame for the ills of this country, when in fact it is in the greatest proportions the rich, and the just-barely-rich, who grow up and raise their own children responsibly, who make the investments, who take the financial risks, who do hard work, and who pay the vast majority of this country’s way in the world, providing for infrastructure and defense and nation-building and the UN and vast quantities of charity at tsunami time. It’s nice that Obama wants to give money to the bottom 95%, but should the top 5% really be paying more than 60% of this nation’s vast yearly expenditure? Should the bottom 50% be given more money – in cash payments from the government – than they contribute in total? Isn’t it obvious how this is electoral pandering, a statement to the effect of, “I, the President of this United States and Commander in Chief of this nation’s Armed Forces, will use the police power of this state to transfer the money earned by a portion of the nation that does not have large numbers of voters to a portion of the nation that did not earn the money, but who will be so grateful for it that they will use their large number of voters to vote for me”? It’s bribery, pure and simple, and it’s not sustainable. Because when the government demands and demands and demands, the citizen does three things: he ceases working, he starts lying, and he moves away. At a certain point, those who get nothing in return for their work cease working, those who are not dealt with honestly will not be honest in return, and those who are not appreciated where they are go somewhere else.
The point is not that Joe the Plumber does not now make $250,000 (“The liar!” they gasp.); the point is that Joe is motivated to run a business making $250,000 – else why risk his savings and put in all that work? – but finds it not worth his trouble when the majority of that bounty goes to someone else who deems himself a better judge of where that money should go. Who knows whether Joe wants to build a beautiful church or gamble it all away? Does Joe even know yet? Does it matter politically? Is Obama’s opinion that the poor of Chicago need better public housing, for instance, inherently right? Does he know what those poor have been up to? Did they do their homework? Did they show up for the school play? Did they make it to every practice? Did they listen to their parents? Did they avoid drugs and alcohol and crime? Did they apply to college? Did they go to class in college? Did they show up for their first jobs on time and do good work? How can Obama, or any other of them, discern from their raptor’s perches in Washington how Joe’s money should be spent better than he can, other than on indisputable necessities like the national defense?
Since Marx, success has been deemed a mark of perfidy. And when Obama is called a socialist or worse, it’s because he exhibits that mindset. He bears the mark of socialism, of the idea that the center can better decide what to do with the output of my labor and your labor and our neighbor’s labor than you and I and our neighbor can.
Anyway, here begins the letter, without indentation, both because Blogger’s indentation is ridiculously edit-intensive if one wants it to look other than plain stupid, and because the letter constitutes is the rest of the post. The letter, except for the now-missing list, was never sent to my wife (listening to U2 tunes on the computer two rooms over – probably watching the videos on YouTube, if I know her, and I do); I figured she can just read it here, if she wants to:
The demonization the rich have undergone in this country is mind-boggling. All you have to make, to be part of the so-called “super-rich,” the fabled 1%, is under $370,000 a year. Now granted, that’s awfully nice, but it’s not Gossip Girl country. When I grew up, my dad made in the $100k to $150k range, probably not that far different from the one-percenters at the bottom of that bracket today. Our life was very nice, but it wasn’t blowing people out of the water. We had three bedrooms in a safe, attractive suburb with good schools; we had one TV; we had one car; we did our own yard work; our most expensive pieces of art were chalk portraits of the kids and a few ivory pieces bought by my dad while on business in Singapore; we drove a series of station wagons (we did have a 1929 Model A parked in the garage, doing nothing; it sold for $10,000 in the mid- to late-nineties); we traveled by car and second-class plane, and our hotels ranged from Motel 6 to Holiday Inn.
The family business almost failed a few times in turbulent market conditions, and might have done so had it not been for the money my dad’s brother had made in the markets and plowed back into the company. Had his brother been soaked by the government because he owed it to the nation, because it was “patriotic” to give (cf. Joe Biden – who’s never shown any evidence of checking the voluntary giving box that appears on all our tax returns), he would not have been able to risk his savings on the business, the business might not have survived, and 10, 20, 50 people (not sure how many were employed at the time) would have lost their jobs, and a family-owned and -operated company that employed over 200 by the mid-2000’s would have ceased to exist. We maybe weren’t in the top 1%, but we were probably in the top 5%, or at the very least the top 10%, and my grandfather, father, and uncle were living productive lives, giving employment to people who needed and benefitted from the jobs run by honest, responsible men, and giving a service to investors and farmers who benefitted from working with honest, responsible men.
It has historically been, for fifty years, the contention of your [Kay’s] party [the Democrats], and increasingly seems to be the contention of mine, that the rich are to blame for the ills of this country, when in fact it is in the greatest proportions the rich, and the just-barely-rich, who grow up and raise their own children responsibly, who make the investments, who take the financial risks, who do hard work, and who pay the vast majority of this country’s way in the world, providing for infrastructure and defense and nation-building and the UN and vast quantities of charity at tsunami time. It’s nice that Obama wants to give money to the bottom 95%, but should the top 5% really be paying more than 60% of this nation’s vast yearly expenditure? Should the bottom 50% be given more money – in cash payments from the government – than they contribute in total? Isn’t it obvious how this is electoral pandering, a statement to the effect of, “I, the President of this United States and Commander in Chief of this nation’s Armed Forces, will use the police power of this state to transfer the money earned by a portion of the nation that does not have large numbers of voters to a portion of the nation that did not earn the money, but who will be so grateful for it that they will use their large number of voters to vote for me”? It’s bribery, pure and simple, and it’s not sustainable. Because when the government demands and demands and demands, the citizen does three things: he ceases working, he starts lying, and he moves away. At a certain point, those who get nothing in return for their work cease working, those who are not dealt with honestly will not be honest in return, and those who are not appreciated where they are go somewhere else.
The point is not that Joe the Plumber does not now make $250,000 (“The liar!” they gasp.); the point is that Joe is motivated to run a business making $250,000 – else why risk his savings and put in all that work? – but finds it not worth his trouble when the majority of that bounty goes to someone else who deems himself a better judge of where that money should go. Who knows whether Joe wants to build a beautiful church or gamble it all away? Does Joe even know yet? Does it matter politically? Is Obama’s opinion that the poor of Chicago need better public housing, for instance, inherently right? Does he know what those poor have been up to? Did they do their homework? Did they show up for the school play? Did they make it to every practice? Did they listen to their parents? Did they avoid drugs and alcohol and crime? Did they apply to college? Did they go to class in college? Did they show up for their first jobs on time and do good work? How can Obama, or any other of them, discern from their raptor’s perches in Washington how Joe’s money should be spent better than he can, other than on indisputable necessities like the national defense?
Since Marx, success has been deemed a mark of perfidy. And when Obama is called a socialist or worse, it’s because he exhibits that mindset. He bears the mark of socialism, of the idea that the center can better decide what to do with the output of my labor and your labor and our neighbor’s labor than you and I and our neighbor can.
Labels: Gossip Girl, politics, taxes
posted by J. R. R. Hawking | 10:32 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home