Who Let the Dogs In? (23 page)

It’s still an estate tax, and it still applies only to those who leave more than $2 million per couple, so Junior gets his first $2 mil without paying anything. Then the government takes 37 percent of everything over that, sliding up to a top rate of 55 percent on truly major estates.

This is a sizable problem for all the Wifford Wasp Witherspoon IVs out there, but not noticeably burdensome to the rest of us. Besides which, you may have noticed that the flowering field of “estate planning” contains an astounding array of loopholes by which the very rich shelter their gelt from the tax man.

Next Bush proposes to flatten the income tax by moving from five progressive rates to four—keep in mind that “flatter” means less progressive, which means less fair—and then adds insult to injury by lowering the rate for the richest taxpayers even more than he lowers the rate for the lowest-income taxpayers, thus making the total system even less fair. According to Citizens for Tax Justice, two thirds of the total tax relief in the Bush package will go to the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans. How Republican.

Now let’s look at this suffering top 10 percent and see just how terribly much they need a tax break. Keep in mind that they have been getting tax breaks steadily since Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, with the following consequences: By 1997, the top 10 percent of the population owned 73.2 percent of the nation’s net worth, up from 68 percent in 1983. The figures keep moving rapidly, so by now it’s fair to guess that less than a fourth of the nation’s wealth is shared by the other 90 percent of us.

Even more staggering, a 1995 study by the Federal Reserve says the top 1 percent of American households (that’s everybody with more than $2.3 million) own about 35 percent of the nation’s wealth, and that figure gets worse every year, too.

Looked at from the other side of the Income Gap, we find that those in the bottom 20 percent have actually lost ground in the nineties, while those in the middle have benefited only very slightly, while simultaneously piling up a staggering degree of debt. Why would anyone deliberately aggravate what is already a ridiculous imbalance?

We’ve just finished with a Congress that couldn’t bring itself to raise the minimum wage by a whopping $1 over three years. And I remind you that the R’s loaded even that pitiful gesture with $40 billion in tax breaks for the rich. Senator Don Nickles of Oklahoma, that nasty man, even tried to use the minimum-wage bill to sneak in an additional tax write-off for the three-martini lunch—what a highly developed sense of class justice he has.

(I call Nickles nasty because, according to
The Washington Post,
he is one of the senators behind a whispering campaign against John McCain, claiming that McCain is unstable because of the years he spent in a North Vietnamese prison camp. If that doesn’t strike you as nasty, what does?)

Back to our man Trump. Being new to Marxist thought, the Donald has not fully grasped the finer points and wants to eliminate the estate tax himself. The bottom line for Comrade Trump is that his one-shot 14 percent wealth tax on those with more than $10 mil would cost him personally somewhere in the neighborhood of $350 million, but abolishing the estate tax would save him twice that. He may be a tyro leftie, but he’s not stupid.

However, the notion of a tax on wealth bears close examination. Eleven European countries already have such a tax, including those devoted capitalists in Germany and Switzerland. As you know, in this country we tax only income, not wealth; but in Europe, they put a low tax (between 1 percent and 3 percent) on wealth in addition to income taxes.

According to Professor Leon Friedman of Hofstra Law School, writing in the current issue of
The Nation,
if we put a 1 percent tax on the total assets of the richest 1 percent of Americans (now there’s a simple tax plan), it would net us $70 billion a year (more than half of what we take in now from all other sources), giving the feds a total of $200 billion per year with which to shore up Social Security and maybe even give a tax break to people who actually need one. Just 1 percent on the 1 percent.

Friedman points out one slight hitch in the getalong here: We’d have to amend the Constitution to impose a tax on wealth, just as we did to impose the first income tax back in 1913. Personally, I think it’s worth doing. And I’m curious to know how many of those worth more than $2.3 million think a 1 percent tax is too high. Pollsters, can you help?

December 1999

Bill Bradley

I
T
’S TAKEN ME QUITE
a while to make up my mind about the Democratic presidential contest. I find Al Gore as discouraging as everybody else does. Even if you agree with him, imagine trying to work up enthusiasm for Gore.

I once spent a day with Al Gore off the record, so I know there’s a real human being in there somewhere. Lord knows what happened to it.

Meanwhile, Bill Bradley has been coming up and coming up. It’s always been clear that the man is a class act, without a phony bone in his body.

The trouble is, class acts are a problem in this country. Adlai Stevenson was a class act, and he lost twice. I’ve had my political heart broken by class acts more times than I care to remember. I’m class-act-shy.

Almost every cycle we get some candidate greatly esteemed by those who know and care a lot about government—John Anderson, Bruce Babbitt, Paul Tsongas—some brainy, professorial type who appeals to some of the media, all the college kids, and practically nobody else. No lunch-bucket appeal.

I long since decided that if the candidate doesn’t have some Elvis to him, he ain’t gonna make it. Bradley has zip in the Elvis department.

What he does have, and it takes a while to explain this, is Midwesternness. Not to paint with a broad brush or anything, but Midwesterners tend to be incredibly practical and incurably down-to-earth. (I base this opinion on the three years, including eighteen winters, I spent in Minnesota.)

Bradley represented New Jersey in the Senate, but he was raised in Missouri and it shows. He can be going along explaining some complicated policy—it’s like listening to a good teacher—when it suddenly occurs to him to explain why we should be doing whatever-it-is in the first place.

“I think we should fix the roof while the sun is shining,” he offers—as homely a metaphor as one can find, but precisely the actual reason we need to make some changes in Social Security, Medicare, education, etc. Everybody nods, and then we go back to the gory details, which he explains so well that everybody then feels like an expert on the subject.

But will it sell in a thirty-second sound bite? No question, Bradley is not a thirty-second kind of guy. But if you listen to him for even ten minutes, what you get is a sense of his depth, unflappability, seriousness, and knowledge.

He also has very good manners, even inducing the notoriously overcaffeinated TV host Chris Matthews to calm down. If I may be crudely political here, he’s the perfect candidate to put up against George W. Bush, who does have some shallow-twit tendencies.

Without being at all witty (I would guess he gets off a good line about once every ten years), Bradley is capable of a wry take on things, including himself. For a man running for president, he’s amazingly mellow, which is what comes of spending years of your life under the incredible pressure of playing in championship games—state high school, college, Olympics, pros.

If you’re used to twenty thousand people screaming hysterically at you while you go for a free throw with a championship on the line, Chris Matthews is not likely to rattle you. This is a guy who knows how to play under pressure.

Bradley has one of those eerily perfect biographies: grew up in a small Midwestern town, top student, top athlete, Eagle Scout, committed Christian, Princeton, captain of the 1964 Olympic team, Rhodes scholar, Knicks star, U.S. Senate. Bradley was so strikingly mature and extraordinary even as a boy that John McPhee, the great
New Yorker
writer, did a profile of him as a college freshman that became the book
A Sense of Where You Are.

The ten years that Bradley spent playing pro ball gave him a rare understanding of what it is like to be black in America, the subject of the best and certainly the most passionate speech he ever made in the Senate. Those years also give us all the character clues. Everyone who ever watched Bradley play knows he made it on brains and hard work rather than great natural talent.

My favorite basketball story is from the Olympics, when Bradley was keen to beat the tough Soviet team. He knew that it would be a rough game and that the Soviets liked to call out their plays in Russian, expecting no one to understand. So Bradley went to Princeton’s Slavic languages department and got them to teach him a Russian street phrase meaning roughly, “Watch it” or “Be careful.”

The first time he got an elbow thrown in his ribs, he used the phrase. The Russians got flustered, stopped calling out their plays, and lost some of their harmony. The Americans won the gold.

His Senate career is also characteristic of the man in that Bradley took on a few tough issues, mastered them, and in many cases got something done about them. His most notable contribution was the tax reform act of 1986, simplifying the code and lowering the top brackets. Brains and hard work—never any flash or grandstanding or posturing. A lot of Bradley’s Senate record is surprisingly conservative, however.

Bradley is a man of truly unusual stature; he seems to have been a grown-up all his life, and a man concerned with the most serious issues. He also talks to voters as though we’re grown-ups, too.

True, he suffers from low-watt charisma. He will not dazzle you with his oratory or his nimble wit. He will, however, just impress the pants off of you with how much he knows and how serious and determined he is to get some big problems fixed. And he’s the man who can do it.

January 2000

Class Warfare, Anyone?

W
E
CONTINUE TO
enjoy the faux-naïf routine offered by Republi-cans and their media flunkies: What could Gore mean by “the people against the powerful”?

Dubya was so confused about it that he called it “class warfare.” I especially enjoy watching Washington pundits affect to be unable to figure out the fuss. They cover Washington, D.C., and they never in their whole lives have seen or heard of a case in which special interest money influenced legislation against the people and in favor of the powerful.

They missed communications deregulation (a bill written by lobbyists), utilities deregulation, bankruptcy “reform,” banking deregulation, the S&L disaster, the killing of the patients’ bill of rights, the pittance in royalties from public lands paid by the oil companies, the sugar subsidy, the ethanol subsidy, and the auto industry’s lobbying against higher pollution standards and a rating system for SUV rollover hazard.