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1/8/13, "The New Liberal Aristocracy," Victor Davis Hanson
"Modern elitists are past masters at preaching one thing and practicing another."
"Limousine liberal” is an old
American term used against those who inherited lots of money and then
became “traitors to their class” by embracing populist politics.
The Roosevelts and Kennedys enjoyed the high life quite apart from
the multitude that they championed. And they were exempt, by virtue of
their inherited riches and armies of accountants and attorneys, from the higher taxes they advocated for others. Few worried about how their original fortunes were made long ago, or that as lifelong government
officials they had their needs met by the state. Most were relieved
instead that as very rich people they wanted less rich people to pay
their fair share
to help the poor.
But the new liberal aristocracy is far less discreet than the old.
Most are self-made multimillionaires who acquired their money through
government service, finance, law, investment, or marriage. If the
old-money liberals lived it up tastefully within their walled family
compounds, the new liberal aristocrats are unashamed about living openly
in a manner quite at odds with their professed populist ideology.
Take former vice president Al Gore. He has made a fortune of nearly a
billion dollars warning against global warming — supposedly shrinking
glaciers, declining polar-bear populations, and the like — while
simultaneously offering timely remedies from his own green corporations,
all reminiscent of the methodology of Roman millionaire Marcus Licinius
Crassus, who profited from fires and putting them out. Now Nobel
laureate Gore has sold his interest in a failing cable-television
station for about $100 million — and to the anti-American Al-Jazeera,
which is owned by the fossil-fuel-rich royal family of Qatar. Gore
rushed to close the deal before the first of the year to avoid the very
capital-gains tax hikes that he has advocated for others less well off.
That’s a liberal trifecta:
enhancing a fossil-fuel consortium,
attempting to beat tax hikes, and
empowering an anti-American and anti-Semitic media conglomerate run by an authoritarian despot —
all
from a former vice president of the United States who crusades for
ending our reliance on fossil fuels and for raising taxes on the
wealthy.
Class warrior Barack Obama spent his winter break in a ritzy rental
on a Hawaiian beach. It cost the taxpayers $7 (or is it $20?) million to
jet him and his entourage 6,000 miles for their tropical vacation. But
whether the first family escapes to Hawaii or Martha’s Vineyard or Costa
del Sol, the image of a 1 percent lifestyle seems a bit at odds with
the president’s professed disdain for
“millionaires and billionaires,”
“fat cats,” and
“corporate-jet owners”
who supposedly can afford such
tony retreats only because they have done something suspect. The media
used to ridicule grandees like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush for
wearing cowboy hats and
wasting precious presidential time chopping wood
or chain-sawing dry underbrush
on their respective overgrown ranches.
But for liberal class warriors, golfing and body surfing in the tropical
Pacific while staying at a zillionaire’s estate become needed downtime
to prepare for the looming battle against 1 percenters. One wonders
about the conversation between the Obamas and their landlord. “We will
stay here, but only on the condition that you remember
that you didn’t
build it”?
Multibillionaire Warren Buffett is a tireless advocate of hiking
inheritance taxes on small businesses and farms. But he has
pledged much
of his wealth to the Gates Foundation, a ploy that
will cost the
federal Treasury billions of dollars in lost revenue.
Meanwhile, if
inheritance taxes go up, millions of terrified Americans will double up
on their life-insurance policies — an industry central to the
multibillion-dollar Buffett empire. It never seems to occur to the
liberal-minded Buffett that there is something tawdry about advocating a
policy that he not only seeks mostly to avoid, but will even profit
from.
So tax avoidance is another characteristic of the new aristocracy —
ask Jeffrey Immelt, the General Electric CEO and Obama point man on jobs
and growth, who endorses the Obama agenda even as he managed to skip
taxes altogether on his company’s 2010 profits....
Senator John Kerry, who will soon become secretary of state, is a
tireless advocate of higher taxes while enjoying his multimillionaire
wife’s multiple estates. In 2010, Massachusetts resident Kerry docked
his new $7 million yacht in nearby Rhode Island in order to avoid paying
about $500,000 in taxes to his home state. Should not Kerry have
welcomed the chance to chip in half a million to an insolvent treasury,
given his advocacy for higher taxes? Could Kerry not have purchased a
smaller yacht for $4 million in order to budget for the necessary taxes?
Gore, Obama, and Kerry, after all, tirelessly boast that the taxes they
advocate would fall mostly on people like themselves — omitting the
fact that, as we see from Kerry’s boat deal, Gore’s TV deal, and Obama’s
adjacent-lot deal with Tony Rezko, politicians not only mostly live on
the public dole without the expenses that the rest of us incur, but also
have miraculous ways of avoiding the sort of taxes they harangue others
about.
During the 2008 financial meltdown, Goldman Sachs was a recipient of
federal cash bailouts. Recently its CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, wrote an op-ed
in which he said, “I believe that tax increases, especially for the
wealthiest, are appropriate.” Why, then, would Goldman Sachs rush to pay
out $65 million in restricted stock bonuses to its own corporate elite
in time to beat the new higher tax rates that began on January 1, 2013?
Isn’t that inappropriate? What would have happened had Blankfein timed
his op-ed for publication in early 2013 rather than November 2012, and
also added “– and that’s why I am not rushing Goldman Sachs stock
payouts just to lessen the tax burden on our wealthiest at a time of
national insolvency.”
Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, who nominally oversees
the IRS, did not just not pay his own taxes while advocating higher
taxes on others, but found incredible ways not to pay what was due —
avoiding payroll taxes, improperly deducting his children’s camp costs,
and taking improper charitable deductions, improper retirement-plan
withdrawals, improper small-business deductions, and so on. The question
in Geithner’s case was not whether he had avoided taxes, but whether
there was any category of taxes that he had not avoided. Perhaps the
creativity by which Geithner avoided his own taxes was seen as an asset
in finding new ways to catch other tax-avoiders.
What explains the hypocrisy of the new liberal aristocracy?...
The more loudly you talk about helping the proverbial people, the more
you are allowed to live quite apart from them without guilt....
For the overpaid and pampered Hollywood movie star, calling for
raising taxes, banning guns, ending global warming, and legalizing gay
marriage means never having to feel too bad about living on the beach
and making, under our capitalist system, more money in a month than do
many Americans in a lifetime.
The growing size and clout of government, and its intrusion into
globalized finance, also play a role. Former Obama OMB director and
liberal Peter Orszag went on to a multimillion-dollar gig at Citigroup.
He now writes warnings about the uncontrollable debt that he helped
accumulate; would that he would sermonize about the incestuous revolving
door that Obama pledged to end. Did he learn anything from Franklin
Raines, James Johnson, and Jamie Gorelick, who occupied top spots at
Fannie Mae in the Carter and Clinton administrations and who all walked
away with millions while the federal mortgage-insurance corporation went
insolvent? The problem is not just that none of the three did anything
to ensure Fannie Mae’s viability, or at least to justify the millions
that they took out, but also that none of them had a reputable record of
banking expertise to justify their being hired in the first place.
In
short, there is just too much big money — and temptation —
for even the
most liberal class warrior
not to cash in on his ample government
contacts and influence.
All these paradoxes pose existential questions: Are the elite architects
of high taxes and big government the self-interested and conniving who
found the path to the good life through cynically embracing such ideas
(ask Franklin Raines or Al Gore), or were they so rich to begin with as
to be unaffected by the ramifications of their ideology — or both? via Lucianne
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