RAHM AND THE DEMOCRATS: “TAX THE RICH, FEED THE POOR…’TIL THERE AREN’T NO RICH NO MORE” ?

 

5/26/21

 

Rahm Emanuel (See one of today’s other posts.) can’t resist the temptation to politicize everything; after all, he is a creation and a creature of politics and government.   On May 17, he wrote an article on the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion piece in which he opined that the Democrats could pursue the “soak the rich” theme with impunity because the most salient modern Republican did the same thing to the adulation of most of his Party.   While Mr. Emanuel had a good point, as he usually does, regarding Mr. Trump’s dismissive, or maybe just completely ignorant, attitude toward the free market and all that it has done for our country and the world, the “make the rich pay their fair share” argument might make a lot of sense politically but makes no sense, at least regarding the U.S. federal income tax, economically or financially.   However, Mr. Emanuel may have another unspoken point, indeed, an opinion that, if he holds it all, he would never utter out loud, to wit, the American electorate surely isn’t getting any smarter and hence is more and more amenable to simplistic arguments that have little grounding in reality.

 

I sent the following letter to the Wall Street Journal, but the paper didn’t publish it.  Given that the Journal has run two of my letters in the last month or so (See two of today’s other posts.), I am not surprised or disappointed:

 

 

 

 

5/17/21

 

Rahm Emanuel (“Why the GOP Has Gone Quiet Over Tax Hikes,” 5/17/21) cites a Pew Research survey indicating that “Nearly 60% of Americans are bothered ‘a lot’ that corporations and rich people don’t pay their fair share” and a Navigation Research poll in which 69% of respondents support raising taxes on the rich.   Mr. Emanuel credits what he sees as this growing consensus to “Mr. Trump’s triumph of decoupling the coalition Reagan worked so assiduously to assemble.”

 

Mr. Emanuel is correct in one of his assertions; surely, Mr. Trump’s characteristic self-serving opportunism fanned the already enormous conflagration of “anti-rich” sentiment and hence crippled the advance of both conservatism and common sense.  However, Mr. Emanuel once again drops the ball in this argument largely because of his combination of political genius and economic ignorance, a combination that is by no means unique among our political class,

 

First, Mr. Emanuel fails to make the distinction between being “rich,” a balance sheet concept, and earning a high income, an income statement concept.   While sounding esoteric, this is a crucial distinction for political, economic, and financial reasons that utterly eludes politicians and the people they are trying to snooker.

 

Second, if indeed people are clamoring for higher taxes on “the rich” because those “rich” are not paying their “fair share” in a country in which the top 1% of earners pay 40% of the income taxes while generating 21% of the income, such outcries have little to do with Mr. Trump.   Such a result can only have come about through political manipulation of people who apparently are bored by the drudgery involved in thinking rather than emoting and hence are easily manipulated.

 

 

Mark M. Quinn

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE DEMOCRATS REALLY DON’T LIKE PEOPLE WHO HAVE MADE, AND SAVED, A FEW BUCKS, DO THEY?

 

5/26/21

 

Yours truly has long suspected that the Democrats, and not a few Republicans, don’t like people making money without their blessing.   Furthermore, the Democrats and their fellow travelers in the Republican Party especially seem to despise people who not only have made money but have managed to resist the temptation to spend with the utter silliness that characterizes so much of American society and put a few dollars away.   Why else would the Democrats try to remove whatever incentives exist for people to make money, save some of the money, invest that money, and hence help build a strong economy?  

 

The Biden administration designs on the capital gains tax are merely the latest manifestation of this ultimately self-destructive Democratic infatuation with sticking it to people who are successful.   They have to know that they will raise little or no revenue by increasing the capital gains tax, so why do it?   I suspect it is part of a larger plan to get “the rich,” this time for real.

 

What the Democrats and more than a few Republicans don’t understand is that, in order for a free-market system to work, some people have to make a lot of money.   Inevitably, they, we, and most people won’t like a lot of the people who will get rich in a free market system; after all, in some, but not as many as some suppose, cases, many of the qualities that serve to make a person rich are not the same qualities that endow them with a high degree of likeability.   Even yours truly finds many of the “rich” to be silly and shallow, people with whom I am glad I don’t have to spend any time.  But what you or I think of certain people has no bearing on their ability to make things and/or provide that people want to buy.  Fortunately, our system of free enterprise does not demand that its participants be genuine humanitarians or even pleasant people; if it did, we’d be a much less rich society.

 

Of course, there is an element in the Democratic Party that would prefer to ditch the free enterprise system altogether, and one suspects that if there were a few votes in it, there would be more than a few GOPers who would go along with such imbecility.   But that is another issue.

 

I wrote this letter on the capital gains tax to the Wall Street Journal on April 26; it was published on May 3:

 

 

 

4/26/21

 

Both Larry Lindsey (“Biden Taxes for Punishment’s Sake,” Opinion, 4/26/21) and the Journal editorial writers (“The Dumbest Tax Increase,” Review and Outlook, 4/26/21) make the point that the proposed Biden capital gains tax increase will, in all likelihood, reduce revenue.   Both articles conclude that one of Mr. Biden’s motives in proposing the increase is to punish those who save and invest. 

 

One does not have to give the Biden economic and political brain trust too much credit, however, to propose another motive for proposing this seemingly pointless and economically destructive tax increase.    When it becomes apparent that the tax increase is actually reducing revenue, the Biden team will present this outcome as an argument for taxing unrealized capital gains, long a goal of the Democratic left.   Since the “rich” will be able to “escape” this “fair” level of taxation by exploiting “loopholes” (i.e., not selling their stocks), the “just goals” of the tax must be met by eliminating this “loophole” by taxing unrealized gains.

 

One might argue that denizens of the Democrat left don’t fully grasp economics, but one could never argue that they don’t know their politics.

 

 

Mark M. Quinn

 

 

 

“RUNNIN’ SOUTH ON DuSABLE DRIVE, HEADING INTO TOWN…” ?

 

5/26/21

 

Yours truly has to admit that one of my guilty pleasures is the 1971 Aliotta, Haynes, and Jeremiah ditty “Lake Shore Drive.”   The song never fails to bring a tear to my eye, probably because so much of my youth was spent driving up and down Lake Shore Drive long past the hour at which, as my cop friend like to say, nothing good happens.   Most of those stories best remain unwritten, though they may surface in the book on which I am working.   

 

Here, however, is an innocuous story involving that tune: Shortly after we moved to Naperville, now some 27 years ago, the marquee of a bar I would drive past on Ogden Avenue on my way to the train declared “Friday night, one night only, Aliotta, Haynes, and Jeremiah.”    Hmm.   Since “Lake Shore Drive” turned out to be a medley of that trio’s hit, I wonder what they did for their, I presume, at least hour long gig.   Did they get up and play “Lake Shore Drive,” wait for the crowd to yell “Play LSD again, you mothers!,” or something like that, and play it again…about twenty times?  By that time having been long past the age at which I frequented establishments that served strong drink and mediocre rock’n’roll, I never satisfied that curiosity.

 

But I digress.

 

It looks like the Chicago City Council is going to re-name outer Lake Shore Drive “DuSable Drive” in order to honor Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, the first non-native to set up shop, almost literally, in Chicago.   Like many of my fellow Chicagoans, I am not for the name change.   Lake Shore Drive, besides being the world’s most beautiful stretch of urban road, would be Chicago’s most iconic street were it not for Western Avenue, once, and maybe still, the longest urban street in the world, running from Howard Street on the northern border of Chicago to 119^th Street on the southern border of Chicago.  And that is only the Chicago portion of Western; it runs well into Harvey, home of the Dells (which, by the way, were never known as “The Mighty Dells” back when they were in the business of producing doo-wop and R&B hits with near boring regularity; the adjective “Mighty” in connection with the Dells only accrued to that pre-eminent vocal group when they became an object of fascination with the public TV crowd about fifteen years ago, but there I go again.), on the south and probably into several north shore communities in the north, but I wouldn’t be the go-to guy on streets north of town.   That I grew up about a block and a half from 119^th and Western might have something to do with my judgment on the relative iconography of Western Avenue and Lake Shore Drive, but, again, and for the last time in this post, I digress.

 

Besides changing the name of Chicago’s, and the world’s, most scenic street, the effort to change outer Lake Shore Drive would be to cave into the whims of a, to put it nicely, fickle crowd.  One can foresee all kinds of future problems by catering to this group of history class also-rans.   So I sent the following letter to the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune; the Sun-Times ran it on May 3; the Tribune did not run it:

 

 

4/29/21

 

Suppose that the city does decide to rename the Outer Drive for Jean Baptiste Point DuSable.   How long do you suppose it will take the self-appointed guardians of all that is woke and virtuous to decide that Mr. DuSable, as the first permanent, non-indigenous settler in our area, was an exploiter of native peoples and consequently demand that DuSable Drive be renamed? 

 

Mark M. Quinn

 

 

 

 

RAHM EMANUEL AND THE OMNIPRESENCE, AND OMNIPOTENCE, OF GOVERNMENT

 

5/26/21

 

Former Chicago Mayor and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, for whatever merits he might display as one of the last sober-minded Democrats of (in his case former) prominence in his Party, suffers from the same affliction that has burrowed its way into every Democrat and most Republicans in “public life,” to wit…everything starts, sustains itself, and ends with government.   While this is a troubling feature among Democrats, it is IN a Democrats’ nature to see everything through the public lens; the Democrats are, as we are seeing so demonstrably in the Biden Administration, the party of government, and the bigger the better.  However, this focus on government as the source of all that life has to offer is far more saddening among Republicans, who are supposed to the be the party of free enterprise.   Sadly, and long before Trump became the herald of the message of impatience with the marketplace and therefore the necessity of incessantly tinkering with said marketplace, those GOPers who had chosen to pursue “public service” had backgrounds remarkably similar to those of their Democratic rivals, backgrounds heavy with positions on the public payroll and bereft of experience in the private sector in which they purport to believe so fervently.   But I digress.

 

The point of this letter that I sent to the Wall Street Journal, and that the Journal published on April 27, is that Mr. Emanuel, who described himself in the cited article as a “sage,” is especially infected by this myopic view of the world, ascribing economic and financial cycles to the political parties that had so little to do with any of them:

 

 

4/21/21

 

Self-described “sage” Rahm Emanuel makes the same mistake as most other politicians and almost all Democrats, i.e., ascribing everything that goes on economically or financially in terms of the politics of the situation and the policies of those who have chosen politics as a lifelong profession.   (“Not Every ‘Serious Crisis’ Is Alike,” Opinion, 4/19/21)

 

Among many other such attributions, Mr. Emanuel talks about the “Republican recession” and “Democratic prosperity.” Mr. Emanuel does not consider for a moment that the aforementioned recessions could have been caused by things beyond the politicians’ control, such as, in the case of the recession Mr. Emanuel ascribes to Mr. Trump, the COVID pandemic, and, in the cases of the prosperity for which he credits Mr. Obama, however halting it might have been, market forces that in fact would have delivered stronger recoveries had it not been for government meddling.

 

One cannot blame Mr. Emanuel, who has spent his life in “public service,” for looking at everything through the lens of politics and the actions of the government; it is a trait endemic to those in his profession.  But neither should we be so willing to place such trust, and such enormous power, in the hands of people, even “sages” like Mr. Emanuel, with such a myopic view of the world.

 

 

Mark M. Quinn