Ironies

Here in Colorado Springs, Doug Bruce, described as an anti-tax activist, the man who crafted something called the "Taxpayers' Bill of Rights" that is often cited as having crippled state government, was indicted for income tax evasion and arrested last week. As we all agree, Mr. Bruce is presumed innocent until proven guilty. It's a straw in the wind though, isn't it?

I say this because news reports claim that two Tea Party activists also have been caught having not filed tax returns for several years.

Having just paid a large tax bill myself, I'm feeling a couple of emotions about Mr. Bruce and the other people who do not feel obligated to chip in what they are legally obligated to pay. I'm resentful, of course. Who wouldn't be? I'm jealous too. I'd rather take my wife to Hawaii for a vacation than help out Uncle Sam. Let someone else carry the ball for a while. I've been paying taxes for going on fifty years now, and what do I have to show for it? Oh, yeah, my mother lived the last year of her life in a rather nice nursing home on Uncle's dime. I can feel a measure of pride in the auto makers and banks I helped bailout a year or two ago. (I know, they've paid back most or all of it and still had enough money to reward richly the executives who nearly drove them out of business.)

CNN reported this morning, by the way, that executives at American corporations averaged a 12% increase in income last year while ordinary working people eked out a living with an average income increase of 2.1%. But I thank the Lord for them, every time I have to pay a fee to get some of my own money from an ATM or get a rate increase on my health insurance. They are creating wealth, if only for themselves.

A respondent to a post on another blog claimed we should not resent those who make so much money. The stockholders of the companies they run are the ones who could cut their pay or fire them, and the fact that this doesn't happen very often must mean the stockholders are satisfied with management and the size of the dividends they receive.

Ironically, John Kenneth Galbraith addressed this point fifty years ago, saying that corporate executives almost always come to be more interested in feathering their own nests than in the welfare of the stockholders or the public. They get away with it because most stockholders aren't paying close attention to what's going on.

I looked at a documentary movie last week. It's called "Casino Jack" and it's about the lobbying business conducted by Jack Abramoff and other young men in a hurry during the last thirty years. The title comes from Abramoff's notorious bilking of Indian tribes during the 1990's. Abramoff accepted enormous fees from a Louisiana tribe to lobby against a casino license for another tribe in Texas they thought would cut into their lucrative business, then exacted more very large fees from the Texas tribe to lobby for a casino on their tribal lands. It reminds me of Milo Minderbinder in "Catch 22" who signed a contract with the American military to bomb a bridge and with the German military to defend the same bridge. In the end he profited outrageously by merely signing his name twice, since the two armies went ahead and actually did the bombing and defending themselves.

In fact, Abramoff and his associates were privately contemptuous of their clients, calling them morons and monkeys in their emails. Abramoff ended up as a convicted felon, but I wonder how much of his ill-gotten gains he has managed to hide.

Here's my advice to all these people. Take some of your money and try to buy a really small camel. When your time on this earth is up, you'll be glad if you have the tiniest one available.

Alternatively, you could try to obtain a needle with a super-sized eye.