What is really hilarious about Cohen's column is that he doesn't understand just how out of touch he is.
Out of Their Anti-Tax Minds
By Richard Cohen
washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, January 6, 2004; Page A17
This is the way things happen in my business. In October the extremely influential GOP activist and White House insider Grover Norquist was interviewed by Terry Gross on her National Public Radio program, "Fresh Air." By December a portion of that interview was reprinted in Harper's magazine, where, over the holidays, I happened to see it. I am writing about it today because, among other things, Norquist compared the estate tax to the Holocaust.
This remark, so bizarre and tasteless that I felt it deserved checking, sent me to the transcript of the show, where, sure enough, it was confirmed. In it Norquist referred to the supposedly specious argument that the estate tax was worth keeping because it really affected only "2 percent of Americans." He went on: "I mean, that's the morality of the Holocaust. 'Well, it's only a small percentage,' you know. I mean, it's not you. It's somebody else."
From the transcript, it seems that Gross couldn't believe her ears. "Excuse me," she interjected. "Excuse me one second. Did you just . . . compare the estate tax with the Holocaust?"
Norquist explained himself. "No, the morality that says it's okay to do something to a group because they're a small percentage of the population is the morality that says the Holocaust is okay because they didn't target everybody, just a small percentage." He went on to liken the estate tax to apartheid in the old South Africa and to the communist regime of the old East Germany. How he neglected Iraq under Saddam Hussein I will never know.
It's hard to overstate Norquist's importance in contemporary Washington. He is head of Americans for Tax Reform, is an intimate of Karl Rove, the president's chief political aide, and has easy access to the White House. He presides over a weekly meeting of important Republican activists and lobbyists where the agenda -- at least Norquist's -- is to ensure that taxes are reduced to a bare minimum, the government is starved and everyone, the rich and the poor, is taxed the same, which is to say almost not at all.
The Bush administration has mindlessly applied this doctrine. It has three times reduced taxes -- mostly on the rich -- careening the federal budget from a surplus to a deficit without end. The rich, who can afford their schools or health care, will not suffer. But the poor and the middle class will hurt plenty -- and state and local taxes, often the most regressive, will go up.
To my mind, the Holocaust should be compared only to itself. I make some allowance for, say, Rwanda or the massacre of Muslims at Srebrenica or the gulag of Stalin's Soviet Union. But when it comes to legalized murder by a state, almost nothing can approach it -- not in its size, not in its breadth and not in its virtually incomprehensible bestiality. The morality of the Holocaust, I would argue, is somehow different from that of the estate tax.
For some time now, the estate tax has been a demagogue's delight. Republicans, including George Bush, like to call it the "death tax." It is said to have produced the demise of the cherished family farm -- although the government can offer not a single example. It is, however, the tax most hated by those who hate taxes the most.
Inexplicably, Norquist's "Holocaust" has somehow left quite a few survivors. Among the 10 richest Americans, for instance, are five Waltons -- heirs to the fortune left by the storied Sam, the founder of Wal-Mart. Forbes magazine says they are each worth $20.5 billion. The rest of Forbes's list of the 400 richest Americans is peopled by other heirs, although some got only a billion or two.
In fact, the moral equivalency Norquist concocts is his own -- and it speaks volumes about the morality of anti-tax Republicans. To them, the rich owe nothing -- just like the poor, they would say. (The difference between rich and poor escapes them.) This is unbridled selfishness in the guise of ideology and makes wealth the moral equivalent of ethnicity or religion or even sexual preference. To Norquist, distinguishing between rich and poor is like making a selection at Auschwitz. It not only trivializes the Holocaust, it collapses all moral distinctions.
When Trent Lott praised Strom Thurmond, the longtime segregationist (and laundry room Lothario), he revealed a mentality that not even Senate Republicans could publicly support -- and Lott had to resign as majority leader. Norquist has gone even further, likening the morality of mass murder to the imposition of a tax on the rich. At his next meeting of GOP activists, someone ought to ask him if he's out of his mind. If no one does, it's because they all are.
cohenr@washpost.com
© 2004 The Washington Post Company |
