One of the core tenets of the Republican religion is that it's immoral to tax rich people.
The rich, the argument goes, got that way by being smarter, more resourceful, and harder-working than the rest of us. They're also brave, stalwart, and trustworthy. Dishonoring this sublime virtue by taxing its economic payoff will cause the rich--delicate souls, all of them--to become discouraged and to not work as hard, thereby harming all of us in the long run.
Yeah, right.
In the first place, if it's individual merit that determines wealth, then why are the Republicans trying so desperately to eliminate the inheritance tax? What's the big problem? It's known that intelligence is heritable, so if you were crafty enough to get rich, the odds are good that your kids will be, too--even without your bequeathing them a huge financial head start. That is, of course, unless you raised them to be lazy, spoiled freeloaders like all those undeserving welfare queens and kings out there.
Republicans learned some time ago not to speak openly about their cherished distinction between the "Truly Needy" and those who are just faking it. It sounds, well, uncompassionate. But I'll tell you what: I'd support reviving this way of classifying the poor, if we could institute a similar way of dividing up rich people. That's right: we need to distinguish between the "Truly Virtuous" rich people, and those who are merely coasting on their good-old-boy connections or Daddy's fortune. And we'd have to stipulate that tax breaks can only go to the former.
The poor have to endure means tests to qualify for the meager help we offer them. In my plan, we'd have "virtue tests" to make sure that only the deserving rich got their government handouts. So what kinds of things could we test for?
Here are my ideas for some questions:
In the last year...
How many inventions have you patented?
How many family-wage jobs have you created? (Subtract from this the number of jobs you've exported to other countries.)
How many weeks of vacation have you taken? (Five or more is grounds for disqualification, even if they're spent in a hellhole in Texas.)
How much have you donated to private charities dedicated to helping the Truly Needy? (Don't forget, it's a Republican sin to help the other, bad kind of poor people, who can in many cases be recognized by their dark skin.)
How much have you collected in health insurance benefits for care that you didn't desperately need? (This would be easy for most poor people to answer: zero.)
How much have you contributed to the trade deficit by buying expensive foreign cars, wines, and other imported luxuries?
Have you had an affair, gotten divorced, done something unmentionable in Las Vegas, or otherwise compromised your "family values"?
Here are a couple more:
If you had a fatal disease that could be cured with stem cells, would you get the treatment?
If your teenage daughter was raped, would you consent to her getting an abortion?
Rich people know the Truly Virtuous answers to these questions. I wonder how many would actually give them.
Of course, it could be that all this virtue stuff is a load of crap designed simply to rationalize greed and mean-spiritedness. I dunno, what do YOU think?