Interesting piece today in the Washington Post, pointing out that the richest 400 tax payers pay as much to the feds as the poorest 40 million in taxes. It kind of puts into perspective the constant refrain that Bush’s tax cut mainly benefits the rich. In today’s lopsided economy, any reduction in all tax rates will inevitably benefit the rich. I guess Al Gore wasn’t smart enough to figure that out. The real worry is the danger in a system where increasing numbers of people are consumers of government goodies, and a smaller and smaller number of people pay for more and more of it. This is a recipe for majoritarian tyranny. If we have one-person-one-vote and you can always vote for higher taxes and spending, knowing you won’t ever have to pay for it, why not do so? There’s a reason public spending increased by 8 percent last year under a Republican Congress. And there’s a reason some Republicans are quietly insouciant about possible future deficits under their tax plan. They figure there’s no legitimate way to stop the dependent class voting for more and more, except throwing the government into periodic fits of bankruptcy. There really ought to be a better way.
ONE MORE THING: A reader points out a weird detail in the Post story. The data was “calculated by a Harvard University professor who asked not to be identified.” Why anonymous? Is Harvard so intolerant a place that a professor who points out that the rich pay more than their fair share would suffer ostracism if it were known? The other alternative is modesty. Well, I spent several years at that great university and modesty was to be found purely on the football team.
BY THE WAY: If there’s anyone with time on their hands, and access to Nexis, I’d love to see whether the phrase “president Bush’s tax cut” ever appears in the New York Times without some appendage reiterating how it helps the rich. My bet is that a good 80 percent of the time, the qualifier is surgically attached.
MORE NEWS FROM THE SOVIET UNION: Newsday’s AIDS reporter, Laurie Garrett, has been arguing for years that medications for HIV are next-to-useless poisons promoted by evil capitalists. Now she is reporting about San Francisco’s latest foray into p.c. hell. The city is apparently considering a ban on ads for HIV drugs, on the grounds that most of the ads depict healthy, robust, energetic people making the most of their lives. This is a terribly dangerous development, various nannies worry. The image of healthy people with HIV actually diminishes fear of the disease and may foster more sexual activity. Well we can’t have that, can we? Don’t these people with HIV know they’re supposed to be victims? This proposed ban is the almost perfect expression of a certain kind of leftism. The condescension is part of it – do they not think that gay men can think for themselves? The hatred of the private sector is another. The ability of people with HIV to look after ourselves, combat the disease, take care of our health and, with the help of the pharmaceutical industry, lead better, healthier lives is almost a rebuke to these activists’ entire worldview. They can’t stop people with HIV and AIDS looking good, or working out, so they do the next best thing. They can simply erase any public images of healthy HIV-positive people so as to insist, against all the evidence, that the meds aren’t working.
The Dish 