Tuesday, August 21st, 2007
The Leona Helmsley Tax
Leona Helmsley is dead. Sadly, her ugly tax-evading legacy lives on in this “Fair Tax” nonsense. The most famous line attributed to the late
We see it in the glowering diatribes equating wealth with moral superiority - that somehow the poor are inherently morally defective because they are poor. For instance, Neal Boortz frequently rails against the minimum wage as the federal government “[using] its police power to force an employer to pay an employee more that that employee’s labor is worth to the employer” - by which he means forcing employers to pay their employees anything at all. Conservatives would have you believe that the poor choose to be poor because “we’ve created an endemic unwillingness to make the choices one needs to be even mildly more successful.” (Translation: The poor are poor because they’re lazy.) Never mind that many of these poor families consist of multiple income earners, each with multiple jobs that barely even pay peanuts (the most salient example of this was the woman with three jobs that The Most Holy George W. Christ, being the insensitive jerk that he is, made the butt of a joke). After all, according to conservatives, only “incompetent, ignorant, worthless adults” make minimum wage.
In other words, the poor are moral degenerates because they don’t pull in twenty-figure salaries, and they’re not absurdly rich because they’re moral degenerates. It’s a neat trick of circular logic used to justify the calcification of socioeconomic strata that’s been going on for the last twenty-seven years.
And now the hatred of the poor is cropping up in the form of tax policy. It’s suddenly not enough that Ken Lay and Leona Helmsley got to hire the best accountants and tax lawyers to suss out as many legal loopholes as possible for them to squeeze through and the “little people” didn’t. Oh, no. You see, on paper at least, the upper 1% has to pay a larger percentage in income tax than those “lucky duckies” conservatives are constantly sneering at. “It’s not fair!” they whine.
And so, by coopting progressive rhetoric about fairness, they’ve advocated the ultimate in class warfare: a national sales tax. And given that the working poor spend a much higher percentage of their meager incomes on basic necessities like food and clothes - the very things that would be subject to sales taxes - than the Donald Trumps of the world, the poor get hit the hardest by a national sales tax. It’s the best of both worlds, really. By coopting progressive rhetoric, they get to claim that they, not the evil “libruls,” are the One True Defenders™ of the “Little Guy” while at the same time enacting policies that hang increasingly heavy millstones around the necks of the people they secretly look down their noses at. Never mind that such a system is unsustainable. Never mind the system’s inherent instability produces a major drag on our economy. So long as they get to reap all the benefits and treat labor as a market externality that they can ignore, marginalize, and, if need be, crush, then “Ford’s in his Flivver, and all’s well with the world.”
Perhaps the best way we can nip this insanity in the bud is to apply the appropriate framing label in much the same way that progressives applied the label “Paris Hilton Tax” to the Estate Tax to signify that that was pretty much the only person being affected by the Estate Tax. I’d like to suggest “The Leona Helmsley Tax” for the National Sales Tax, since that appropriately represents the utter contempt conservatives have for anyone who makes less than a bajillion dollars per second.
