Soak 'em
My grandpa was an Iowa farmer back when there was a large number of small family farms in Iowa. Not the small cluster of large corporate ones that exists today. Long retired from the field, and an octogenarian widower at the time, he married a restaurateur from Albert Lea, Minnesota. Shortly after, he read something I had just written in college and told me about a visit he recently had with some of his new wife’s wealthy relatives. A cousin or the like, during what was evidently an inappropriate dinner conversation involving politics and possibly religion cut the thick air by quipping something towards the newcomer in the group that approximated: “What we need in this country are politicians that are good common sense farmers like Elmer Moeller. Elmer, what would you do if you were president?” His wry reply to her, he told me smiling: “The first thing I would do is raise taxes on the rich people.”
Common sense tends to hold majority opinion, and 59% of poll respondents (of The Hill newsletter) that are registered voters say they agree with 29-year-old Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s idea to raise the top marginal tax rate to 70% on income over $10 million per year. In the same poll, even 45%
of Republicans say they supported this idea. And these numbers are despite the fact that no Washington politician has explicitly promoted an idea such as this in more than four decades.
A top marginal rate of 70% was the number all the way up until the Reagan presidency dawned in 1981. The rate had plunged to 28% before he left office, and has only slightly come back since—to 37%. As I inferred, this has absolutely not been a political issue in this country until this very moment. Democrats have avoided it like a mud puddle in the middle of the street. In awe of Reagan's charm, each attempted to replicate him and turn the party's focus from wooing working people to the ballot to trying to outdistance Republicans in Wall Street fundraising.
Gallup has been polling on the issue of taxing the rich since the early ‘90s and the support for higher taxes hasn't strayed since then outside the range of 60 to 70% in the data. Only about 10% of people, at any given time, have supported
lowering government revenue on millionaires and billionaires. Now that Ocasio is on the march, the gatekeepers of the government-- from the cult of Ayn Rand-- are positively terrified. They’ve gone after the freshman lawmaker for her supposed lack of education (she’s a summa cum laude graduate in economics), her social media presence, her physical appearance, anything that might possibly stop the approaching train of economic sanity. She’s supposedly a counterfeit champion of the working class with a secretly-expensive wardrobe and/or a hidden upper crust upbringing. Her given name-- from her Latina parents-- is Alexandria, but her nickname in high school in the Bronx was the more whitebread... Sandy! Aghast!
More menacing than the personal attacks upon the change agent are the lies and misinformation being spread about the plan itself. Perhaps the first and loudest lie against one of the most consistently popular political ideas in America was that Ocasio is talking about a 70% rate on
all income. She is not. The working class and the poor have already been held hostage to a national tax policy that lays an unfair burden upon them. As I said earlier, the 70% rate applies to income after and above the $10 million level. How many of you reading this just fell out of your (tax) bracket? And this is a modest number. In the early '50s, during perhaps the most lively economic era in the nation's history, the rate topped off just above 90%.
Oh my god, how the super-rich hate this. They have urine running down their leg, collectively and figuratively-speaking. At the World Economic Summit in Davos, Switzerland Tuesday, the billionaire class came armed with pillows, blankets, and warm milk. The chief of investments at Guggenheim Partners called it "scary," and said the likelihood of something like this policy coming to fruition was "quite real," although I think he was just trying to reverse-jinx it. The billionaire CEO of Blackstone, Stephen Schwarzman, attempted to label the U.S. "the second most
progressive (my italics for emphasis) tax regime in the world." (And don't you just adore his pointed use of the sinister word "regime"?) Some supply-siders are arguing that the plan is doomed to fail because the rich could still find ways, as they do now, to hide their gains and offset their losses, but better, I say, not to concede defeat just because the uber-rich are disreputable and contemptible outlaws. Conservative Democrats in Congress, which still describes most of them and the sum of the party leadership, are doing their familiar dance-- ducking under their walnut desks and telling their executive assistants to tell visitors that they're "in conference," but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doubled down at a birthday tribute Monday to one of the critical forebears of her theories on economics and common sense, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr...
"I do think a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don't have access to public health is wrong." In a follow-up tweet, she posited: "It's wild that some people are more scared of a marginal tax rate than the fact that 40% of Americans struggle to pay for at least one basic need, like food and rent."
The bathtub
America's right political wing has done a masterful job of selling government social action as an overstep and an expensive waste of money. The military and defense budget ballooned to $590 billion in FY 2017, and President Trump proposed an increase in that line item to $681.1 billion for 2019. The director of the Joint Staff, Kenneth McKenzie, told the Senate Armed Forces Committee, during a hearing last month, that "anything below $733 (billion) (for 2020) would increase risk" for our nation's military. And then we continue to hear each day from the legislative warriors that protect these battlefield warriors that the government that governs least, governs best.
So that addresses a certain hypocrisy, but what about the concerted effort by think tanks, foundations, and research organizations to destroy government effectiveness and thereby weaken public support for government of any kind? Neoconservative Grover Norquist famously said, with casual brutality, that he didn't want to abolish government, he just wanted to shrink it to a size small enough where he could drown it in a bathtub. (Seriously, what can you drown in a bathtub? A child? A puppy?) Ineffectiveness IS the strategy. Remember that fact when the president speaks-- or tweets-- to you. Slash taxes, create deficits, and finally, step three, decimate public services with austerity budgets. Naomi Klein spelled it out for us in her vital book
The Shock Doctrine, and after being tested out on the peoples of Russia, Argentina, Chile, Poland, Indonesia, and a host of other nations, it came home to the country that birthed the idea. It's Milton Friedman/University of Chicago economics. The right wing doesn't want to decrease deficits. It's playing pretend. Deficits enable them to take their desired action.
We're told that bureaucrats and regulations suck the lifeblood out of our economy. Say you're trying to get a building permit at the local zoning office, where the budget has been slashed 50 percent. Only one clerk is available to process your paperwork, and precious time slips away. You blame the bureaucracy of having to secure a permit. We underfund. Things don't work. We underfund more. Things don't work more. This is our public schools in a nutshell. Our public housing. Our meager attempts at environmental protection. They get their government-run health care while they rob you of the same security. Their stenographers in the national news media are eager to print the outline and affirm a new truism. Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez are "radicals" because they support single-payer, government-provided health care, which the skeptics in the senate and the house say will weaken the quality of health care, yet not a single one of those legislator-skeptics gives theirs back.
Mother Teresa was one of them. She was a true believer in the starving of the poor. For her, that somehow brought glory to God. She palled around with Charles Keating and the Duvaliers of Haiti. She opened a mission in the Bronx, and because of all of the positive publicity surrounding her public persona, donations poured in. A building was purchased for the price of one dollar from New York City and renovations of it were planned. City regs insisted that an elevator be installed to assist the disabled patrons. Teresa refused the elevator. It was inconsistent with her beliefs about charity and keeping people as sick as possible and nearer my God to thee. Sound like a major political ideology we cope with in this country? The plans for the building fall through because an elevator for the disabled is deemed unacceptable. But then the larger point to be made is how the New York local media in 1990 then handles the entire story. (
This NY Times metro article from that period is downright hilarious.) It's "bureaucracy" that killed the plan. "Political correctness" in support of the disabled nullified the best intentions of the missionaries.
Government bashing is relentless here. It's a hysteria. A cult. Armed resistance is not considered out of the question in their verbiage and in their literature, and even congressional members and candidates sniff up to this line. Corporations are permitted to move in and fill the void left by a shrinking government, and that, friends, then becomes the reality of fascism. Remember it's not the actual size of government. Military spending explodes in size. Corporate giveaways are rampant. The main targets are social spending, taxes, and regulations on business. This ineffective government becomes the scapegoat for each of your problems-- and chances are, you have plenty of problems. Can't pay your bills? It's taxes. Didn't get that promotion? Government affirmative-action programs and unchecked immigration. Crime and moral decay got you down? Well, the government forced prayer out of the schools. Won't be able to retire? The government won't let you invest your Social Security in the stock market. One size-- and one product-- fits all. The single cause of anti-government keeps the Republican Party from ripping apart at the seams, separating the have-quite-a-lots from the have-almost-nothings.
Attacks on government are really then an attack on the most vulnerable of ours. Not only does it strip them of their basic necessities, it strips them of their will to fight. It works to strip away a century-long legacy of successful safety-net programs for the protection of the least of us. That makes the anti-government agenda the most radical one that exists in U.S. politics.
The Einsteins of Comedy
Bob Einstein was a terribly funny man. Right up there with the funniest of them. You loved him on
Curb Your Enthusiasm, as the brilliant but unfortunate comic daredevil Super Dave Osborne before that, and as Officer Judy on
The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour before that.
There’s a pedigree with that Einstein gang. Father Harry was a Vaudevillian dialect comic known professionally as Harry Parke, or Parkyakarkus, who infamously died of a heart attack at the dais of the Friars’ Club during a roast for Lucille Ball and Desi Arnez in 1958. Bob’s brother, Albert Brooks, who changed his surname when he entered show business to avoid cheap laughs, is the equally brilliant writer, director, and star of several hit films, an Academy Award nominee for the film
Broadcast News in 1987. A much older brother, Charles, more than two decades senior to both Bob and Albert, was a writer of a popular baseball book during the ‘50s,
The Fireside Book of Baseball.
My favorite Einstein family anecdotes are these…
When Harry died, the comics at the Friars felt they could not continue with the show, but Milton Berle asked singer Tony Martin to perform a song. The crooner’s choice was entitled “There’s No Tomorrow.” At Harry’s funeral, contemporaries Berle and George Jessel, ever the classy gentlemen, both paid tribute to Harry by performing their acts next to the casket.
Albert was pals with Rob Reiner at Beverly Hills High School during the 1960s. Rather infamously, Carl Reiner went on a now-long-ago-erased episode of the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and told the host that the funniest person he knew was a high school friend of his son, a kid named Albert Einstein. Albert would later become a favorite guest of Johnny’s during the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, and if you have some time tonight, do a YouTube search for “Albert Brooks speak and spell.”
Bob—as Super Dave—told my favorite joke on David Letterman in 1990. I watched it the night it aired when I was 15 and it was the only joke I told for about 20 years. If somebody were to say, tell a joke, or we need a joke, I had this one. It’s a talking dog joke. When Super Dave tells it to Dave, he tells it from a “book” of adorable dog stories he has purportedly written for children. This particular story begins, “Once upon a time a guy walks into a bar…”
And it goes
a little something like this—with the setup starting at about the 2 minute mark.
After the joke, there's a clip from Super Dave's Showtime series, but there was a problem with the tape and the clip is not really ready to be shown. There's a mishap that takes place and an adjustment that's needed for the ending and you won't want to watch the clip but Super Dave will be back later when everything gets ironed out with the tape.
