By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, March 30, 2021
Elizabeth Warren — the ridiculous hustling flatbilly
grifter from Massachusetts from Oklahoma who snookered the academic
establishment by pretending to be a Native American while writing dopey
self-help books that are so sloppy and intellectually dishonest that it’s a
surprise skeezy old Joe Biden hasn’t plagiarized them yet, a political
grotesque who prides herself on being in the first generation of her family to
attend college but rage-tweets as though she were in the first generation in
her family with opposable thumbs, as ghastly and deceitful and god-awful a sniveling
and self-serving a creature as the United States Congress has to offer — is, in
spite of the genuine facts of her sorry case, getting a little full of herself,
and believes that as a senator, she should be above the petty “heckling” of the
little people.
You know, peons. Like you.
Sometimes, they mess up and tell you what they are
thinking. And what Senator Warren is thinking is: “Shut up, or I’ll use the
power of my office to shut you up.”
At issue is the senator’s recent social-media spat with
Amazon. Because Senator Warren is as dreadfully predictable as a chlamydia
outbreak in West Roxbury, you can imagine the insipidity of her complaint:
“Blah blah blah, fair share, higher taxes on everybody except important hometown business interests and rich
liberals in Cambridge, blah blah blah, Amazon.” Etc.
To which Amazon offered a perfectly sensible response, if
I may paraphrase: “You’re in the Senate, you ridiculous ninny — and you
are even on the freakin’ committee that writes tax legislation. You got a
problem with tax law? We know a counterfeit Cherokee princess repping Massachusetts
you might want to have a quiet word in private with.”
(My words, not theirs. Should have been theirs, though.)
Senator Warren, because dishonesty is her reflexive
instinct (remember that bullsh** made-up story about being fired from a
teaching job for being pregnant?), protested: “I didn’t write the loopholes you
exploit.”
Well, senator . . . this is going to be kind of
awkward!
Do you know what another word for “loophole” is? Law.
Loopholes aren’t manufactured at some overseas sweatshop loophole factory
operated by Charles Koch’s evil cousin Skippy — they are manufactured right
there in the august body that is the United States Senate Committee on Finance,
of which Senator Elizabeth Warren is, insanely enough, an actual member. She
may as well have a sign on her door reading “Loopholes
’R’ Us.”
This is Senator Warren’s mess. Jeff Bezos just pays the
bills.
And, of course, “loopholes” aren’t really loopholes.
“Loopholes” are what useless low-minded demagogues call intentionally designed
features of the tax code when they are being used by somebody it is politically
convenient to attack. We see this year after year after excruciatingly stupid
year: Somebody with big ideas about spurring blue-collar employment proposes
a tax subsidy for politically connected manufacturers, and
then two years later bitches that tax subsidies are being used by politically connected manufacturers. Because we tax
businesses on their profits rather than on their cashflow, ordinary expenses
are deducted from taxable income — and politicians bitch about businesses getting to deduct expenses resulting
from business decisions the politicians don’t like. An endless cycle of
asininity, over and over and over.
Amazon’s strategy for minimizing taxes on its profits is
indeed a devious one: not making very much money. Amazon routinely
posts quite low profit margins: Last year’s 5.5 percent, modest by the standards of an Apple or
a Google, was unusually high for Amazon, and in many years Amazon has
reported no profit at all or almost none, choosing to reinvest its income into
the business — you know, that chronic capitalist short-termism we’re always
hearing about.
That’s not a loophole. That’s how basic U.S.
corporate-tax law works.
It doesn’t have to work that way, of course: Democrats
control both chambers of Congress and the White House, too, and there isn’t
anything stopping them from passing a big fat progressive tax-reform bill that
raises corporate taxes and capital-gains taxes to 65 percent, that radically
narrows the deductibility of business expenses, whatever.
Go ahead. Should be fun to watch.
But this isn’t about taxes. This is about power.
Senator Warren has informed Amazon that she intends to —
her words, here — “break up Big Tech so that you’re not powerful enough to
heckle senators.” If the people of Massachusetts had any self-respect, they’d
remove her from office over that threat.
(If the people of Massachusetts had any self-respect,
they wouldn’t be the people of Massachusetts, so she’s probably safe.)
But allow Professor Williamson to give Professor Warren a
little civics refresher: Here in the United States, we have a nifty thing
called the Bill of Rights, which means that everybody — everybody —
is powerful enough to heckle a senator. It goes with the job you effin’ dolt.
(See? Heckling is easy!) This isn’t North Korea or Venezuela or East Germany —
not yet! — where people have to be afraid of criticizing those who hold
government office. The fact that Senator Warren so obviously wishes that it were
so is a real good reason to retire her pronto.
Heckling pissant politicians is our national pastime.
It’s what we do. We have a word for the kind of society in which those without
power are too terrified of those with power to criticize them: tyranny.
And tyranny is what Senator Warren plainly desires — if
we take her at her own word. Of course, there are lots of reasons not to take
her at her own word, beginning with the fact that she is a habitual liar.
If Senator Warren weren’t dumber than nine chickens and
as useless as teats on a boar hog, it would be genuinely surprising that she
would put this political extortion threat into writing and publish it. Because
that is what she is doing and what must be understood: Senator Warren is
threatening to use the power of her office to impose economic sanctions on
Americans to keep them from publicly criticizing her. I don’t have any
particular sympathy for the recreant techno-bullies over in Jeff Bezos’s shop —
I think it is just damned weird that our nation’s biggest bookseller is also
our premier book-banner — but once you accept this kind of abuse of political
power, it’s a short route to chaos.
This is, in fact, precisely the kind of thing the
Democrats impeached Donald Trump over: the abuse of official power. Senator
Warren “has acted in a manner grossly incompatible with self-government
and the rule of law.”
We have the senator’s own word on what must follow from
that.
And it involves more than heckling.
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