Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Then came ninety-five years of Jim Crow state and local lawmaking until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed.
Lastly, let us give thanks that our bad politics provide our terrible politicians with something relatively harmless to do. They’ve been spending most of the past two years campaigning on their godawful political platforms. This has kept them out of our hair and away from the rest of us in remote places like Iowa, New Hampshire, and the Twittersphere.
It could be worse. They could be engaged in ordinary day-to-day life nearby. For example, if Joe Biden hadn’t been being driven from place to place on the campaign trail he might have been driving his own car in typical elderly fashion at 15 mph the wrong way down one-way streets while leaving his turn signal on for half an hour.
And anyone with any money invested in real estate can feel thankful that Donald Trump has been too busy to send more real estate development into bankruptsy.
Speaking of which, Elizabeth Warren’s specialty as a law school professor was bankruptcy law. If she’d been in private practice she might have been working for Google or Amazon or Microsoft, and Google or Amazon or Microsoft would be bankrupt.
And South Bend, Indiana, might as well be, with a poverty rate of 25.4 percent compared to the national average of 12.3 percent. Plus the city’s violent crime rate is 157 percent higher than the nation’s. Whatever Pete Buttigieg was doing as South Bend’s mayor, South Bend residents must be thankful that he took some time off to do it to Iowans.
Let us all bow our heads in thanks for bad politics.
Robin Hood Arithmetic
W. C. Fields to his adopted daughter Poppy: “I am like Robin Hood: I take from the rich and give to the poor.”
Poppy: “What poor?”
Fields: “Us poor.”
—Poppy (1936)
The Sherwood Forest ethic has a long-standing appeal. The legend dates back at least to the thirteenth century. Today all politicians promise to be something of a Robin Hood and some politicians promise to be Robin, Little John, Friar Tuck, and Maid Marian rolled into one: free health care, free day care, free college tuition, forgiveness of outstanding student loans, Universal Basic Income (UBI), and throw in the kitchen sink of subsidized housing for the homeless who crowd the sidewalks of San Francisco and Portland where everybody votes for politicians who promise subsidized housing for the homeless.
Taking from the rich and giving to the poor is a not unkindly notion and often a tempting idea. Alas, some Sheriff of Nottingham math is in order.
The 10 percent of Americans who earn the most money make a total of about $4.75 trillion a year. These are the rich. Not that they’re crazy rich. An annual household income of $118,000 puts people in the top 10 percent. But let’s not quibble; $118,000 ain’t hay. They’re the rich. We’ll take from them. And, what the heck, let’s take everything from them. All $4.75 trillion.
Now let’s give to the poor. Or try to. The federal budget for 2020—without any new programs for dispensing costly goods and services at no cost to the recipients—is . . . you guessed it . . . $4.75 trillion.
A 100 percent tax on the income of the rich would last the federal government one year.
Then, the next year, when the IRS comes to take 100 percent of rich people’s incomes . . . My guess is they’ve moved to the Cayman Islands.
Even if the rich stick around, they haven’t been getting any money all year so now they’re the poor, and they qualify for getting all the free stuff too.
How are we going to pay for it? I suppose we could ask the 10 percent to keep working while continuing to not get paid. They might be crabby about that.
So let’s not tax income. Let’s tax wealth. Being bloated plutocrats isn’t about what the rich earn, it’s about what they own. The filthy rich still have a fortune socked away in physical assets, stocks, bonds, real estate, and the secret Cayman Islands bank accounts they all use. (Slip a little Medicare for All and UBI to Cayman Islands bank tellers and we’ll have rich people’s PIN numbers in no time.)
America has tremendous wealth disparity. This is obvious, although wealth disparity is somewhat harder to quantify than income disparity. People have to report their incomes. People do not have to report their Chanel bags, Hermès scarves, Prada shoes, and Versace frocks. Also the value of such luxuries—not to mention the value of stocks, bonds, and real estate—fluctuates. (And people are subject to fibbing.)
Nonetheless, a search of what statistics are available about personal wealth indicates that the net worth of U.S. households is approximately $95 trillion and that the richest 10 percent of Americans own at least 75 percent of that wealth or, in round numbers, $71 trillion.
Now we’re talking real money. We’ll have plenty to give to the poor—$71 trillion. Oops, make that $69.5 trillion. (We forgot to subtract $1.5 billion in outstanding student loans.)
Also, we’ll have to pay off the U.S. national debt—$22 trillion. The reason we’ll have to pay off the national debt is that America’s top 10 percent of business owners, corporate executives, high tech savants, doctors, lawyers, and other professionals have given up on working for a living and are lazing around their beach houses (soon to be expropriated).
They’re not buying any Chanel bags, Hermès scarves, Prada shoes, and Versace frocks or Tesla Model X SUVs or Bertram yachts or Sub-Zero wine refrigerators. They’ve quit paying the
