Nicholas Kristof writes in a NY Times op-ed piece entitled
A Glide Path to Ruin:
President Bush has excoriated the "death tax," as he calls the estate tax. But his profligacy will leave every American child facing a "birth tax" of about $150,000.
That's right: every American child arrives owing that much, partly to babies in China and Japan. No wonder babies cry.
"Birth tax" is a clever framing. More musing on whether or not it will resonate with Americans, after the fold.
Next to Austrailians, Americans are the most tolerant of thievery of any people, anywhere. Perhaps that's because we revere the myth of our own lawless beginnings on the frontier so much. The Australians had a much higher per centage of original immigrants who were, in fact, petty thieves (often of dire necessity), but we too love the underdog, the Robin Hood story -- even the filthy rich man if he was "self-made". It's part of our self-conception, but it's mostly self-deceit.
Too bad this basically kind and subversive instinct on behalf of the extra-legal betrays us so comprehensively, right into the hands of the superwealthy master thieves who currently own all three branches of the federal government and the nation's broadcast media to boot. We're so loath to crack down on the really successful crooks, the ones who generations ago stopped being underdogs (if they ever were) and became addicted to the dark side: power, wielded cleverly from the shadows. We're so ready to forgive the Enrons and the war profiteers that we end up being ruled by them -- at least until they overplay their hand (as crooks always do) and ruin everything, the way they did in 1929.
Then we briefly come to our senses and permit a national sense of collective purpose to inform our choice of leaders, and shape our invention of social institutions, for a little while. Until we relax and once again the forces of the dark side regroup and find out how to exploit our original weakness again.
All it takes to stay out of their clutches, in principle, is the kind of distaste for unearned royal privilege that our nation's founders had: the simple rage against George that emantes from that inspired rant of Jefferson's, our Declaration. Today we're apt to pass over his lengthy bad-mouthing of old George, dismissing it as merely a rhetorical device, and dwell instead on the high-flown sentiments concerning individual liberty and the inalienable rights of man. This is a mistaken reading of that tract, however. Those were not the phrases that roused his contempraries (who set him the task of speaking for them). It was the taxes that had their dander up. The seminal event of our revolution is not a slave revolt (look to Haiti's history for that kind of heroism) but the Boston Tea Party -- a kind of WTO protest by middle-class merchants, complete with trashed private property and an anti-taxation message, writ large.
We'd best not forget that we were born not of idealism and high-flown ideas about liberty (many of those founders were slave owners), but in simple rage at a superwealthy ruling class that had taken too much, and given back too little, to the folks in the middle. Loyal to a fault at first, our patrician colonial founders eventually reached the point where they felt deeply exploited, and ready to do something dangerous about it.
The only time in American history when a truly progressive social revolution emanted from the working class upwards was after 1929. It is instructive that it didn't take the form of violence, as it had in Russia or France long before, but of increased trust in a president and his new federal programs to empower the out-of-work and rescue an abused economy.
We are not a revolutionary people. We are tolerant, peace-loving, at least domestically, the great carnage of our Civil War being a kind of dreadful mistake we blundered into once and will never, ever, mess with again. We're lazy politically (but workaholic vocationally) -- more Swiss than Irish, for all our willingness to export war and death all over the world: a kind of irresponsible vicarious warlikeness by which we cheaply convince ourselves we're "the land of the brave". We don't like trouble. We're not tall men with bright swords and fierce ways, we're
hobbits. Really, really, pushed into it by world events we'll go to war and then we're tough as hobbits -- enduring little guys -- but fighting isn't in our character: except for the usual minority of loudmouths to be found in any crowd, who are mostly just talk. We're the largest assembly of different ethnic and racial groups on the planet that ever grudgingly made a union. That's because we're timid and not so proud and touchy as we pretend to be, and so much the better for it, I say.
So where's our Frodo now that we need him?