They cheered Steve Forbes last week during his luncheon speech to the Executives’ Club of Chicago. And this, I confess, cheered me.
Lately, I’ve been worried that Republicans, especially wealthy business types, were about to come to their senses. After six years of booming economic prosperity–a prosperity realized mainly by the wealthy–I figured the LaSalle Street wing of the Grand Old Party would begin moderating its views. Common sense, if not compassion, would cause it to move to the political center, where a majority of the American people are working harder without very much to show for it. There they could score valid points against President “Flexi-Bill” Clinton and the Democrats. They might even manage, when nobody was looking, to shave a few more points off the capital gains tax.
But noooooooo. The wing-tip set wants more. Some even want it all, or so it seemed Wednesday in the Grand Ballroom of the Palmer House Hilton Hotel.
Forbes, the third-generation multimillionaire who gained fame two years ago by financing his own primary campaign for the presidency, was speaking to a sold-out, $550-per-table gathering of Chicago’s business elite. The publishing heir is no great speaker, so his well-mannered audience listened with rapt silence until halfway through his speech. Then Forbes let fly the lines that many in the audience had paid to hear:
“The biggest dead weight that remains on American business and family life today,” he said, “is the federal income tax code.”
(Having finished their broiled swordfish and vegetable medley, the audience leaned forward for the coup de grace.)
“This monstrosity, you can’t reform or tame it! This beast, the only thing you can do is to kill it! Drive a stake through its heart! Bury it and hope it never rises again to terrorize the American people!”
At which point Forbes was interrupted by sustained applause–not enough to tinkle the Grand Ballroom’s massive crystal chandeliers–but enough to confirm that he had hit political pay dirt.
After the speech, on the way out, a friend of mine and fellow liberal–the president of a local cultural institution–squeezed an elbow and whispered in my ear: “That guy is dangerous.”
There was no time to reply, so I just smiled. Indeed, I smiled all the way back to the office.
Steve Forbes? Dangerous?
Hah!
Steve Forbes is the personification of the Republican death wish. Just when you think the GOP is about to capture the high ground on legitimate issues (like welfare reform, say, or deregulation,) just when Flexi-Bill gets caught in another half-truth, just when the Democrat’s whining ethnic and sexual minorities start grating on popular opinion, just when all appears lost, the Republicans come up with somebody like Steve Forbes. Or Newt Gingrich. Or Congressman Dick Armey (R-Texas), the guy who wants to abolish the Internal Revenue Service. And there are more waiting in the wings. Watch next year as the GOP’s true-believers reject moderation and nominate somebody named Peter Fitzgerald, a right-wing state legislator, to accomplish what I once thought impossible–six more years for U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun (D-Ill.)
Sure, I’ll be getting mail until Thanksgiving from fans of Forbes and his flat tax. The talk-radio zombies actually believe it would be fairer, somehow, to throw away the progressive tax tables and assess rich and poor alike at a flat 17 percent. They’d also do away with deductions for home mortgage interest, local taxes and charitable giving. And they’d exempt from taxation all income from investments (the latter, we are assured, to stimulate investment and economic growth.)
This would be done in the name of simplification. As if the rich, in their 80-year war against the graduated income tax, were not the ones who caused the federal tax code to grow several times lengthier than the Holy Bible.
More Top Picks Best Baby Jumpers For Infants
Thankfully, they’re smarter than that in the great American middle. Your average Joe and Jane get angry at the Democrats from time to time, for selling out to public employee unions, say, or for caving in to the affirmative action special pleaders. Sometimes they vent that anger at the polls, as in the 1994 congressional races. But invariably the GOP manage to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
They do it with characters like Forbes, the tax simplifier, who raises breeding cattle on his 449-acre New Jersey estate so as to avoid local property taxes. Or they elevate a firebrand like Newt Gingrich, who uses tax-exempt charitable foundations to feed his political apparatus.
It’s a shame, in a way, because those parts of the Republican message that the American public needs to hear–the parts about free markets, civil liberties, property rights and personal responsibility–rarely get a competent airing. Instead, we get rants against partial-birth abortion, gun control and, of course, the graduated income tax.
Someday the GOP will figure it out and get its act together. Someday the executives at the Executives’ Club will recognize that the system already is skewed in their favor, and that to demand more is to hazard all.
Someday they will. But hopefully, not before the next election.