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In case some of you missed this “revelation” several months ago. Out
of Their Anti-Tax Minds
By
Richard Cohen, Tuesday, January 6, 2004; Page A17 This is the way things
happen in my business. In October the extremely influential GOP activist and
White House insider Grover Norquist was interviewed by Terry Gross on her
National Public Radio program, "Fresh Air." By December a portion of
that interview was reprinted in Harper's magazine, where, over the holidays, I
happened to see it. I am writing about it today because, among other things,
Norquist compared the estate tax to the Holocaust. This remark, so
bizarre and tasteless that I felt it deserved checking, sent me to the
transcript of the show, where, sure enough, it was confirmed. In it Norquist
referred to the supposedly specious argument that the estate tax was worth
keeping because it really affected only "2 percent of Americans." He
went on: "I mean, that's the morality of the Holocaust. 'Well, it's only a
small percentage,' you know. I mean, it's not you. It's somebody else." From the transcript,
it seems that Gross couldn't believe her ears. "Excuse me," she
interjected. "Excuse me one second. Did you just . . . compare the estate
tax with the Holocaust?" Norquist explained
himself. "No, the morality that says it's okay to do something to a group
because they're a small percentage of the population is the morality that says
the Holocaust is okay because they didn't target everybody, just a small
percentage." He went on to liken the estate tax to apartheid in the old
South Africa and to the communist regime of the old East Germany. How he
neglected Iraq under Saddam Hussein I will never know. It's hard to overstate
Norquist's importance in contemporary Washington. He is head of Americans for
Tax Reform, is an intimate of Karl Rove, the president's chief political aide,
and has easy access to the White House. He presides over a weekly meeting of
important Republican activists and lobbyists where the agenda -- at least
Norquist's -- is to ensure that taxes are reduced to a bare minimum, the
government is starved and everyone, the rich and the poor, is taxed the same,
which is to say almost not at all. The Bush administration
has mindlessly applied this doctrine. It has three times reduced taxes --
mostly on the rich -- careening the federal budget from a surplus to a deficit
without end. The rich, who can afford their schools or health care, will not
suffer. But the poor and the middle class will hurt plenty -- and state and local taxes, often the most
regressive, will go up. To my mind, the
Holocaust should be compared only to itself. I make some allowance for, say, Rwanda
or the massacre of Muslims at Srebrenica or the gulag of Stalin's Soviet Union.
But when it comes to legalized murder by a state, almost nothing can approach
it -- not in its size, not in its breadth and not in its virtually
incomprehensible bestiality. The morality of the Holocaust, I would argue, is
somehow different from that of the estate tax. For some time now, the
estate tax has been a demagogue's delight. Republicans, including George Bush,
like to call it the "death tax." It is said to have produced the
demise of the cherished family farm -- although the government can offer not a
single example. It is, however, the tax most hated by those who hate taxes the
most. Inexplicably,
Norquist's "Holocaust" has somehow left quite a few survivors. Among
the 10 richest Americans, for instance, are five Waltons -- heirs to the
fortune left by the storied Sam, the founder of Wal-Mart. Forbes magazine says
they are each worth $20.5 billion. The rest of Forbes's list of the 400 richest
Americans is peopled by other heirs, although some got only a billion or two. In fact, the moral
equivalency Norquist concocts is his own -- and it speaks volumes about the
morality of anti-tax Republicans. To them, the rich owe nothing -- just like
the poor, they would say. (The difference between rich and poor escapes them.)
This is unbridled
selfishness in the guise of ideology and makes
wealth the moral equivalent of ethnicity or religion or even sexual preference. To Norquist, distinguishing between
rich and poor is like making a selection at Auschwitz. It not only trivializes
the Holocaust, it collapses all moral distinctions. When Trent Lott
praised Strom Thurmond, the longtime segregationist (and laundry room
Lothario), he revealed a mentality that not even Senate Republicans could
publicly support -- and Lott had to resign as majority leader. Norquist has
gone even further, likening the morality of mass murder to the imposition of a
tax on the rich. At his next meeting of GOP activists, someone ought to ask him
if he's out of his mind. If no one does, it's because they all are. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57436-2004Jan5.html |
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