The Non-Debate on Taxes

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, September 15, 2021

 

The thing to keep in mind is, none of the half-bright grifters really means it.

 

If you will forgive an over-egged metaphor, our contemporary Republicans and Democrats are not opposite poles of the political planet but a binary star system, both orbiting the same point: the pursuit of money, power, and status. They are, in fact, so fundamentally similar that without the cultural cues that are today the main means of political communication, it would be impossible to tell them apart.

 

Consider the apparatchik of the moment, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and her big night at the Met Gala. To say that it was in bad taste to wear a white dress emblazoned with the words “Tax the Rich” to a party with a $30,000 cover charge misses the point — the New York Democrat was in costume, like Lil Nas X in his C-3PO outfit and Kim Kardashian dressed as what she is thinking about. The issue isn’t raising revenue for federal programs. The issue is that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez looks good in white — it is her color, as you can tell from her many white dresses, her white Tesla, and her white neighbors. (Of course she lives in an apartment building called “Agora at the Collective,” straight out of Stuff White People Like.) She holds an elected office, but mainly she is a celebrity and a social-media influencer. Of course she likes a party. Of course she likes having her picture taken. Why wouldn’t she?

 

She can wear her “Tax the Rich” dress all she likes, because Wall Street has Senator Chuck Schumer around to make sure that doesn’t happen. Senator Schumer talks as good a class-war game as any other blossom in that half-organized bouquet of bungholes he calls his political party. But, somehow, he never gets around to acting on it. Donald Trump would have been delighted to sign into law a trebling of tax rates on private-equity firms and their “carried interest” — like all deadbeats with poor credit, he instinctively detests bankers and anybody who reminds him of a banker.

 

Democrats say they want to jack up taxes on investment income, but, as it turns out, most of those investment bankers and private-equity guys and hedge-fund sharps and venture capitalists live in New York City, Connecticut, New Jersey, and the Bay Area — and you will, I think, notice what those places have in common, politically. Democrats run the show right now, controlling both houses of Congress and the presidency. They could end the carried-interest “loophole” (it isn’t a loophole) by Friday, if they wanted to.

 

They don’t want to.

 

At some level, even callow nobodies such as Representative Ocasio-Cortez understand this, which is why her shtick is so shallow and so low-rent. She knows how many houses Bernie Sanders owns, how much money Nancy Pelosi has, how fantastically wealthy Al Gore made himself marketing the apocalypse. Barack Obama took off his Rolex when he needed to be Captain Social Justice and put it right back on once it was safe to do so. Even Subcomandante Malarky and his idiot junkie son somehow managed to grow wealthy while posing as the ambassadors from blue-collar America.

 

This isn’t politics — it’s the politics show.

 

The Right’s answer to Representative Ocasio-Cortez is not, and could not be, a member of Congress. The Democratic Party is led by elected officials and their sycophants for the benefit of elected officials and their sycophants; the Republican Party is led by media figures for the benefit of media figures. The Republican version of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is Dan Bongino, the talk-radio goofus who has taken over the late Rush Limbaugh’s old time slot.

 

Responding to the Ocasio-Cortez kerfuffle and the House Democrats’ recently announced tax-hike proposal, Bongino went full Murray Rothbard. “Why do I owe you anything?” he demanded. Never mind all that “fair share” talk, he said, why should he or anybody else pay the government any taxes? “Taxes,” he thundered, “are state-sanctioned theft.” I have a little bit of sympathy for that line of argument when I hear it from an anarcho-capitalist. But Dan Bongino, currently an employee of a multinational media conglomerate, spent almost the entirety of his pre-broadcast career as a tax-eater, a government employee attached first to the teat of New York City’s taxpayers and then to the teat of federal taxpayers. He’d still be on the government teat if not for the good sense of voters who rejected him in two states and three elections.

 

I have no doubt that Bongino did important work at the NYPD and the Secret Service, or at least that he sometimes was in the same room with people who did important work, but where, I wonder, does he think NYPD and Secret Service salaries — and those generous benefits and pensions — come from? Magic goddamned beans? No, they come from taxes, from that “state-sanctioned theft” he rages about.

 

You can be a balls-to-the-wall libertarian if you like — my own politics run that way, in fact — but not when you get your bread by the sweat of the taxpayer’s brow. This kind of thing would be worrisome if it were serious, but it isn’t serious. It is only another version of Christopher Buckley’s “Yuppie Nuremberg Defense”: The mortgage has to be paid somehow, and, as a racket, the politics show beats the hell out of selling martial-arts gear out of your kitchen.

 

Fox News and MSNBC, Bongino and Ocasio-Cortez, Proud Boys and Antifa, American Greatness and people who huff Scotchgard at breakfast instead of paint fumes — it’s the pop-politics Battle of Stalingrad, and the only sensible thing to do is to cheer for casualties.