I know you fancy the Olasky discussion, but how about changing to a real issue with real consequences for real people?
They don't feel your tax pain
by Don Feder
Wednesday, April 12, 2000
As our annual day of rendering (Caesar-wise) approaches, it is good for the serfs to understand who wants to keep them under the heaviest yoke in our history.
Al Gore and Bill Clinton are offended - yes, personally offended - by George Bush's plan for a five-year, $483 billion tax cut. Gore says it's ``economic snake oil' that would jeopardize Social Security and take us back to the era of mega-deficits.
Regarding risky, tax-cutting schemes (for him a redundancy), Clinton advises: ``This is a moment for making tomorrows. This is not a moment for indulging ourselves.'
Some of us, self-indulgent slobs that we are, wonder why, with a projected budget surplus of $200 billion this year, we can't luxuriate in a little tax cut.
For the average household, total taxes now exceed the combined cost of food, shelter, clothing and transportation. The typical American works more than four months out of the year just to pay his federal, state and local levies.
Washington alone consumes more than 20 percent of America's total economic output. When the average American earns just $25,800 a year, he pays $14 in federal taxes for every additional $50 of income.
What World War II was to industrial production, the Clinton-Gore years have been to the growth of government. In 1992, federal tax revenue was $735 billion. It now exceeds $1.9 trillion.
Under Clinton-Gore, revenues have grown 7.6 percent a year, at a time when the annual inflation rate was 2.2 percent.
Bush is proposing the restitution of roughly half the annual surplus over the next five years. Taxes would be reduced from one-third for the lowest bracket to about one-fifth for the highest. He would double the current $500 per-child tax credit, removing another 6 million families from the tax rolls.
Under the Bush plan, a married couple (each earning $35,000 a year) with two children would see annual taxes cut by $2,613. Over five years, that's enough to buy a car or make a down payment on a college education.
Don't indulge yourselves with a tax cut, Clinton and Gore urge, indulge government, instead.
Keep taxes high in fat years, as well as in the lean. Save Social Security. Save the public schools. Do it for the elderly. Do it for generations yet unborn. Just do it.
In Atlanta last week, Gore disclosed his discovery of a ``digital divide' that has resulted in unequal access to computer skills and the Internet by minority students.
The vice president wants to set a national goal of computer literacy for every eighth grader, at an undisclosed cost. Many public schools can't even make children literate by junior high school. Gore believes that by spending enough he can help schools make them computer literate.
Many of you are working two jobs to support yourselves, your kids and your government. You are chronically exhausted, indebted, living from paycheck to paycheck, worrying about your future.
Clinton and Gore do not share your anxiety or feel your pain. On Jan. 20, 2001, Bill Clinton will retire with an annual pension of $151,800, plus periodic cost-of-living increases, plus whatever he pulls in from writing and speaking. If Hillary is elected to the Senate, add another $141,300 to the family's income, more than enough to afford their $1.7 million, 11-room Chappaqua, N.Y., home.
As vice president, Al Gore is making $181,400. Should he succeed his master (God help us), he will be the first president with an annual salary of $400,000.
Clinton-Gore can afford to urge non-indulgence, to lecture us about not spoiling ourselves with extravagant tax cuts, while they spend our earnings pampering Democratic constituencies.
Unlike Congress, few of us can give ourselves a salary increase. But in November, we will have an opportunity to vote ourselves a raise of sorts. We earned it. And, damn it, it's our money, not Clinton's and Gore's.
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