Good morning Trumpkins. Today’s discussion is about your man as a “genius” for navigating tax law in such a way as to avoid paying up for a couple of decades. First of all, of course, he isn’t one. His accountants and lawyers did all the heavy lifting here and Trump himself had nothing to do with it, His battalions of little people take care of matters like that. In fact, one of the accountants said he had a hard time getting the boss to pay attention as he explained what he was up to tax-wise. A lawyer, Jack Mitnick, who oversaw Trump's income tax returns in the mid-1990s, said he, Trump, had little interest in the tax code and didn’t understand it. So much for the genius theory. And neither are the accountants and lawyers geniuses. They’re tax experts who are paid to know the ins and outs of tax law. Nothing genius about it. It’s their job.
Meanwhile, as your favorite billionaire was ingeniously using these laws to avoid paying any taxes, I paid taxes to the tune of many thousands of dollars. I’ll bet you did, too, as we struggled to make ends meet, raise children and pay for their schooling, and all the rest. That’s the system your guy (obviously) favors and wishes to continue and strengthen: He pays nothing, you pay a lot. I guess if he can get you to vote for him under those circumstances, he is a genius of sorts. What working class people see in him, except for maybe authoritarianism, is beyond understanding.
Trump said in the debate that his not paying taxes makes him smart and that even if he did, the money would be squandered. Which brings us to a discussion of the bigger picture when it comes to taxes.
Taxation is not a commie plot. We citizens pool our money in the form of taxes to buy for ourselves collectively things we want and need but which would be impractical to buy individually: Roads and bridges, police protection, schools, national defense, and so on. No question, some tax dollars are not well spent; there is graft, corruption, and mismanagement. And lots of pork (with every bit as much of it going to Republican districts as Democratic ones.)
But that doesn’t translate into tax revenue as a whole being “squandered” thereby making it smart to not pay. The things mentioned above and countless others are things we wish to have, and they do not come from our fairy godmother. We have to buy them. That’s why good citizens – citizens with a mature sense of perspective and a sense of gratitude for the blessings of this country and its civilizing institutions, look past the inevitable mis-spendings and pay their fair share willingly.
Without a doubt, a major component of anti-tax orthodoxy – of the squander theory – is the idea of “welfare.” When Tea Party types carp about big government and high taxes, their most favorite shibboleth, they’re really talking about government taking money away from them and handing it over to their less responsible fellow citizens. Big government is code for what they like to call income redistribution -- a process by which money is snatched from the hard-working and given to the lazy and stupid. For many, that process, fictional though it may be, characterizes the government’s tax-and-spend activities in their entirety.
There are unquestionably some lazy/stupid/corrupt people getting government money in this fashion. But all of the government’s so-called “safety net” programs add up to less than 10-percent of the federal budget. Of that, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, these programs include: The refundable portions of the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit, which assist low- and moderate-income working families; programs that provide cash payments to eligible individuals or households, including Supplemental Security Income for the elderly or disabled poor and unemployment insurance; various forms of in-kind assistance for low-income people, including SNAP (food stamps), school meals, low-income housing assistance, child care assistance, and help meeting home energy bills; and various other programs such as those that aid abused and neglected children.
So, yes, some of our federal tax dollars go to “welfare.” Ninety-percent of them do not. Most of those go to national defense (16%) and social security/medicare-medicaid (49%). (If you are against these programs, social security and medicare, because you believe them to be “socialistic” then you should step up to that and call openly and vigorously for their repeal, and not hide behind the specious “I paid into it” argument.)
In normal times. Trump’s that-makes-me-smart remark is one that would echo down the corridors of time and be cited in the history books as the thing that ended the candidacy of a major political party’s nominee for president. But that hasn’t happened and probably won’t, simply because Trump’s irresponsible and ignorant ideas and statements tumble forth daily, so that any one ridiculousness tends to not get the attention it deserves. Today’s cancels out yesterday’s.
Trump surrogate – i.e. shameless toady -- Newt Gingrich says if Trump wants to win this thing he has to get a different song, other than "I gotta be me." But it will never happen. After all, where's the fun in that? The idea that he wants to serve the people as president of the United States is laughable. That’s not what this is about. What it’s about is ego feedback. What he wants is to bellow orders and spout off his ridiculous ideas and opinions while his acolytes vigorously nod their heads – “You’re absolutely right about that, Donald,” they say as he opines that the earth is flat and the moon is made of green cheese -- and as his hot-eyed rally people, which, as Dorothy Rabinowitz, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote, includes “his accumulation of Alt-Right cheerleaders, white supremacists and swastika devotees” -- scream their adoration.
In her WSJ editorial, entitled “Hillary-Hatred Derangement Syndrome,” Rabinowitz concluded with this thought: “It will be either Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton—experienced, forward-looking, indomitably determined and eminently sane. Her election alone is what stands between the American nation and the reign of the most unstable, proudly uninformed, psychologically unfit president ever to enter the White House.”
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