Who says spending years studying literary criticism doesn’t pay off? Well, your parents, actually, but that isn’t the point. The point is, this sort of training can be surprisingly useful in figuring out what sort of character you’re dealing wth by examining the remarkable things that come out of their mouths.
Consider Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), an 84-year-old who has been in politics since he was 26 and has a net worth of $4 million, placing him in the op five percent of Americans in wealth. He recently explained his support of the Trump tax plan, which would eliminate the estate tax for about 5,000 dead multi-millionaires a year but gives still-living working class Americans little or no tax relief which cutting programs hey depend on.
Says Grassley, such a move “recognizes the people that are investing as opposed to those that re just spending every darn penny they have, whether its on booze or women or movies.” Clearly rich investors, like Grassley, are more valuable members of society than poor consumers who have to spend every darn penny they earn and can’t afford to invest in hedge funds and tax shelters.
It seems like Grassley has a somewhat darker view of the matter than the first Republican, Abraham Lincoln, who said “God must love the common man. He made so many of hem.” The Senator seems to feel they are frittering away their paltry earnings on sex, drugs and the picture show. But probably most of hem are actually spending their dough on food, shelter, transportation, utilities and taxes.
If Grassley was the Senator for Aspen, the Upper East Side or Beverley Hill 90210, this sort of sneering contempt for the hoi polloi might be expected, but down-to-earth, farm state Iowa? Possibly Grassley has been hanging out with his fat cat donors too much and his constituents too little.
Ditto for 83-year-old Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Ut), also a member of the top five percent, with a net worth of $5 million. He’s for cutting corporate taxes in order to “help those who help themselves.” Perhaps he’s a little out of touch about exactly how rapaciously firms like Wells Fargo, Mylan (Epipen) Labs and Uber have been helping themselves.
Conversely, Hatch wants to cut Obamacare and other safety net spending because the government spends trillions on people who “won’t help themselves, won’t lift a finger.” Mormons are famous for being as industrious as their emblematic bees, but contempt for those who struggle and are left behind in life is more worthy of Ebenezer Scrooge than Brigham Young.
In addition to being out of touch with the lower class, Grassley and Hatch are probably also out of touch generationally. They came of age in the 1950s and rode the greatest wave of prosperity in history for the next thirty years. They may not have noticed from their well-feathered nests that times have changed, the tide has turned, and life has gotten harder for the average Americans they allegedly represent than in the halcyon days of their youth.
For his part, President Trump was recently an attendee at a New York fundraiser. And by the ay, why is he raising funds? I thought he said he was so rich he didn’t need to be beholden to donors? Maybe he lied, but there he was when cornered by a couple of his fellow Manhattan moguls, Stephen Schwarzman (Blackstone CEO, net worth $12.4 billion ) and Richard LeFrak, (real estate rajah, net worth $6.3 billon), cornered him to whine about how hard life is for people like them, stuck in the top one-tenth of one percent.
The Republican tax plan eliminates the estate tax for them, as well as the alternative minimum tax. It lowers their personal tax rate, permits the use of the carried interest scam, and cuts the corporate tax rate by 40%. In short, they figure to benefit bigly from the greatest reverse Robin Hood trick in history, but is that enough for them? No! They want to retain the deduction for state and local taxes. It would be cruel to make them pay the same tax as all those ant-like little people they can see crowding the streets from their penthouses.
A spokesperson for the seemingly bottomless greed of these jokers, explains the logic of their position. To tax the rich is akin to “killing the goose that lays the golden egg.” They’re “the high earners the economy needs to be successful.”
Presumably, if they lose the state and local tax deduction, it will no longer be worth their while to go into work. They may become layabouts like Grassley’s constituents and sink into a moral abyss of booze, babes, and movies. Or perhaps they will go on strike like John Galt, until they are appreciated.
How will the economy get by without a manipulative leveraged buyout artiste or “one of the biggest landlords in the tri-state area?” I don’t know. But I, for one, am willing to give it a try. Even if, unlike them, I can’t afford to eat imported French cakes on the bread line.