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
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