Rich people are scum. . .just ask any liberal. He’ll tell you that well-paid people are morally bankrupt, grasping, heartless, freebooting sons‘o bitches who have won Life’s Lottery. Forever nosing into other people’s business, liberals fret endlessly about how much money other people earn. They have a “gut sense” that some incomes are “just too much,” although any attempt at articulating a formula for how much each person should earn is a sure-fire way to look like a fool. This hasn’t stilled the chorus of tongue clucking.
A current target of persnickety finger pointing is Mr. Dick Cheney, who is darkly referred to as “an Oilman.” In the year 2000, private citizen Cheney earned $36,086,635. He was left with a net income of $21,791,577 after the taxing authorities soaked him for $14,295,058. That same year Mr. and Mrs. Cheney donated to charity another $7,841,646. So the Cheneys handed over sixty-one percent of their income in taxes and charitable donations, a total of $22 million, 136 thousand, 704 dollars.
As a counterpoise to Mister Cheney, the tax-hungry Democrats offer us masculine-role-model Albert Gore, the junior. In 1997 Mister Gore claimed an income of $200,000. His total contribution to charity that year was $353, or a bit more than one-tenth of one percent of his income, which was less than Mister Gore and his wife, Mary, spent on pest control ($389). (If they’re that cheap, why is she nicknamed Tipper?) Fellow liberals Bill and Hillary Clinton repeatedly wrote off their discarded underwear as “charitable contributions.” America’s pre-eminent liberals, it seems, prefer being generous with other people’s earnings.
Long, long ago, insightful European aristocrats identified the fatal weakness in our form of government. They predicted that once American voters got it into their heads that they could vote themselves any benefit (at someone else’s expense) the days of democracy were numbered. As late as the Great Depression, seventy-five percent of Americans still believed that the government had no major role to play in fixing the financial complaints of its citizens. A lot has changed since then.
Under the tutelage of numerous Democratic Party mentors, starting with Franklin Roosevelt, America’s mendicants have become militant, surly, self-righteous and organized. Without a hint of shame they will tell you that they are entitled to your earnings because they are: (choose one) below average earners, have habits or attitudes or compulsions that make them undesirable as employees, have reached “retirement age,” have produced families that they can’t support, have low I.Q.s, whatever.
Democratic Party politicians cultivate this crop of petulant moochers with loving care. Only half of the American population pays any income tax at all. Of those who do pay income tax, the bottom fifty percent of taxpayers contribute less than five percent of all the income taxes collected. This vast pool of non-taxpayers and tiny taxpayers is the natural constituency of the Democratic Party. By nurturing class envy, racial grievance and the myth that hard-working achievers were merely “lucky,” Democrat politicians foster a sense of entitlement in their constituents. Democrats are encouraged to believe that picking their neighbor’s pockets is just a way of achieving “fairness.”
Way back in 1984, when Walter Mondale was running for the presidency, he kept carping on the need to soak the rich. He remained vague about just who “the rich” were. When pressed on the matter, he finally became specific. A rich person, he proclaimed, was anyone who earned eighty thousand dollars. It sounded like a king’s ransom to the Democratic Party’s core constituents in rural Mississippi and the slums of East St Louis and South Central Los Angeles, but to folks in other parts of America who had struggled to earn eighty thousand bucks and were still hanging on to membership in the middle class by their fingernails, it sounded like the Democrats were targeting them for destruction. The voters stomped Mondale at the polls.
Ronald Reagan’s election was a triumph for common sense. After all, if a person who was earning $40,000 by working 40 hours a week decided to earn $80,000 by working 80 hours a week, what could he expect from the Democrats? They would call him one of the evil rich and steal his earnings along with his incentive to build a business, employ more people and improve the economy. By reducing burdensome taxes, Ronald Reagan increased everyone’s incentive to work and build. The invigorated and expanded economy that resulted from tax reduction produced a generous increase in tax revenue flowing into Washington (which a Democratic congress spent like drunken sailors).
One in every four hundred Americans is a millionaire, which says a lot about the possibilities for self-improvement in our country. Vastly more Americans are near-millionaires. The typical American millionaire works longer hours than the average worker. They are inventive-driven people. The typical millionaire spent years building a traditional business, such as a funeral home or a bowling alley. Few American millionaires were the recipients of inherited wealth; those who were are mostly widows. For every millionaire there are many businessmen and professionals who are near-millionaires. They all share a commitment to hard work; they are all imbued with hope. Why would anyone want to suffocate such positive role models? The Democrats do it to increase their appeal to their under-achieving constituents. Wealth confiscation and transfer is how they buy votes, it’s the wellspring of their political longevity, it’s how they cling to power.
The genuinely generous person shares his own wealth with others. The Cheneys’ charitable contribution of $7 million, 841 thousand, 646 dollars bespeaks a generosity of spirit. Al Gore’s niggardly $353 contribution (less than his rat poison bill) suggests a less expansive response to human need: let ‘em apply to the welfare bureaucracy. That leaves only one question in need of an answer: Which charity accepted Bill Clinton’s funky underwear?
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Thomas Clough
Copyright 2001