Categorical Aperitif

Well, well:

Bomb scare shortens Rudy Giuliani's visit

MELBOURNE - Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani's visit here Wednesday was sidetracked by a bomb threat.

Harris Corp. headquarters in Melbourne received the telephone threat at 1:27 p.m., shortly before the former New York City mayor and his campaign team flew into Melbourne International Airport on a charter jet.

That would be the airport that's "international" largely because of daily flights to the Bahamas, but never mind.

Giuliani was scheduled to tour Harris headquarters and speak with employees. But his visit to Harris was canceled because of the scare. Instead, Giuliani stayed at the airport, where he eventually delivered a speech amid heightened security that included metal detectors and a bomb-sniffing dog.

Addressing more than 100 members of the news media and local supporters in an airport hangar, Giuliani proposed a slew of federal tax cuts that taken as a whole, he said, would amount to "the largest tax cut in the history of the United States."

If elected, Giuliani pledged to push for a more level federal income tax scale, in some cases providing a greater amount of tax relief for those with higher incomes. He also proposed decreasing corporate and capital gains taxes, and eliminating the estate tax.

"America needs a flatter, fairer tax system," he said after being introduced by Forbes business magazine editor-in-chief Steve Forbes Jr., a former Republican presidential candidate who is serving as a campaign adviser.

Giuliani said the tax cuts would stimulate the economy and "put America back on a pro-growth path" by rewarding financially successful individuals and businesses.

"Reward success. Don't penalize success," he said. "If I leave more money in your pocket, you'll spend it more intelligently than the government would."

Such as on a tiara. Sigh. Do these people ever have any new ideas? And here I'd thought Romney was the soulless robot and Giuliani was the soulless thug. Perhaps we should start thinking of Giuliani as a sort of soulless chimeric robo-thug.

A little while ago I found in my files a nice piece from around last tax day by George Lakoff and Bruce Budner. It aptly and briefly explains what's wrong with the taxes-penalize-success Moloch to which so many Republicans (and not a few Democrats) offer their prayers and devotions. Briefly: taxes aren't penalties for material success; they're payments to support an infrastructure that helps to make material success possible. And the more one has profited from this infrastructure, the more one owes for its support. This is not theft; it's justice (emphases mine):

America's government has at least two fundamental functions: protection and empowerment. Protection includes the police, firefighters, emergency services, public health, the military and so on. Empowerment includes the infrastructure needed for business and everyday life: roads, communications systems, water supplies, public education, the banking system for loans and economic stability, the SEC for the stock market, the courts for enforcing contracts, air traffic control, support for basic science, our national parks and public buildings, and more. We are usually aware of protection. But the empowerment infrastructure, provided by taxes, is usually taken for granted, hidden or ignored. Yet it is absolutely crucial, a fundamental truth about America and why America provides opportunity.

[...]

Taxes are part of our common wealth, what we all share. Protection and empowerment serve the common good. Because of our common wealth, we are all protected and America's empowering infrastructure is available to all. That is a fundamental American value: the common wealth should serve the common good. It benefits everyone.

Citizens are financially responsible to maintain this common wealth. If we shirked this responsibility, we could not maintain our roads, fund our schools, protect ourselves from military threats, enforce our laws and so on. Equally important, we could not create prosperity for ourselves, because we would have no protection of our intellectual property, no oversight of our markets, no means to enforce our contracts, no way to educate most of our children.

I know that many libertarians have orgasms at the thought of privatized education, and I'm sure there are some who are crazy enough to think that we'd all be better off with a totally privatized legal system and military (I did know one who actually thought that roads should be privately built, maintained, and operated), never mind the implications for individual freedom of a system where law and power are totally for sale to the highest bidder—but this is all beside the point, as Rudy Guiliani is certainly no libertarian.

Few people dispute this responsibility at some level. Disagreements generally arise over the amount and the relative apportionment of the responsibility. Differing concepts of fairness drive this debate. While many progressives say it is only fair that those who earn more pay a higher percentage of their earnings as taxes compared to those who have difficulty making ends meet, conservatives respond by asserting that it is unfair to "punish" the financially successful by making them pay more.

An important point often lost in this debate is an appreciation that the common wealth, which our taxes create and sustain, empowers the wealthy in myriad ways to create their wealth. We call this compound empowerment—the compounded use of the common wealth by corporations, their investors and other wealthy individuals.

Consider Bill Gates. He started Microsoft as a college dropout and has become the world's richest person. Though he has undoubtedly benefited from his unusual intelligence and business acumen, he could not have created or sustained his personal wealth without the common wealth. The legal system protected Microsoft's intellectual property and contracts. The tax-supported financial infrastructure enabled him to access capital markets and trade his stock in a market in which investors have confidence. He built his company with many employees educated in public schools and universities. Tax-funded research helped to develop computer science and the internet. Trade laws negotiated and enforced by the government protect his ability to sell his products abroad. These are but a few of the ways in which Mr. Gates's accumulation of wealth was empowered by the common wealth and by taxation.

As Warren Buffet famously observed, he likely couldn't have achieved his financial success had he been born in Bangladesh instead of the United States, because Bangladesh had no banking system and no stock market.

Ordinary people just drive on the highways; corporations send fleets of trucks. Ordinary people may get a bank loan for their mortgage; corporations borrow money to buy whole companies. Ordinary people rarely use the courts; most of the courts are used for corporate law and contract disputes. Corporations and their investors—those who have accumulated enough money beyond basic needs so they can invest—make much more use, compound use, of the empowering infrastructure provided by everybody's tax money.

The wealthy have made greater use of the common good—they have been empowered by it in creating their wealth—and thus they have a greater moral obligation to sustain it. They are merely paying their debt to society in arrears and investing in future empowerment.

This is the fundamental truth that motivates progressive taxation.

It is a truth that undercuts conservative arguments about taxation. Taxes provide and maintain the protecting and empowering infrastructure that makes our income possible.

This basic truth is simple and obvious upon a few moments' reflection, but prosperous reptiles like Steve Forbes have made an art out of conning people into focusing entirely on taxes as a taking of the fruits of people's hard-earned labor (never mind the extent to which massive fortunes are themselves often built on the taking of the fruits of other people's labor)—while distracting attention from the fact that taxes are also a kind of giving back that helps to make the making of wealth possible. If only big-name Democrats could stand before their microphones and denounce this sophistry in clear, passionate language, we'd be on our way to an America where plutocrat Republicans and their think-tank stooges and their pundit flunkies couldn't stand up in public and blather about cutting capital gains taxes without being pelted with garbage. But back to Rudy:

Not everyone was there to cheer for Giuliani. Several supporters of Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul were in the crowd, including some critical of Giuliani for his support of the Iraq war.

One man tried to question Giuliani in a confrontational manner, but he was shooed away by Giuliani supporters.

Members of a group called Brevard Patriots for Peace held up signs that, in a sarcastic reference to Giuliani, stated, "Let's put another fear mongering hypocrite in the White House."

I'm not sure that's either "sarcastic" or a "reference to Giuliani," but never mind. I almost feel like I should give the Paul campaign a little money just for the delightful spectacle of watching some of his supporters chase Sean Hannity down the street, berating him all the way. The shout toward the end of "We're not falling for it any more!" makes me think one of the most optimistic thoughts I've thought in a long time:

It's morning in America.