In the latest round of negotiations over President Joe Biden’s proposal to raise taxes by $2.1 trillion, Democrats have struck a moderate, but hypocritical, compromise. According to The New York Times, the agreed-upon funding scheme will target “the merely rich more than the fabulously rich” by “raising tax rates on income rather than targeting wealth itself.”
Off to the side, one can hear Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk sighing with relief.
As Newsmax reported, their plan “largely leaves technology tycoons like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk untouched.” This news comes just months after a Pro Publica exposé demonstrated how the two mega tycoons pay very little, if anything, in federal income tax.
Why would the so-called “Tax the Rich” Democrats leave the fortunes of two of the richest men in the world largely untouched? For the same reason that they allow these same billionaires to evade federal regulatory rules, such as Musk’s deliberate disregard of spaceflight safety standards, which has led to fiery explosions.
And, coincidentally, these people contribute generously to Democratic campaigns and causes.
Staff from Bezos’ Amazon provided over $2.2 million to the Biden campaign and nearly $1.0 million to the DNC Services Corp. Those at Musk’s SpaceX and Tesla provided more than $210,000 and $106,000 to the DNC Services Corp.
While these billionaires may have bought themselves a reprieve from the Democrats’ progressive tax agenda, not so lucky are the people historian Patrick Wyman refers to as “the American gentry.” These are the “single-digit millionaires” who own concrete assets like farmland, apartment buildings and construction companies, and live in unfashionable cities like Allentown, Pennsylvania.
And, coincidentally, many of them supported President Donald Trump.
It is on these “gentry,” not on the billionaires against whom Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren rage with such verbal ferocity, that the burden of the new taxation will fall. Class warfare messaging might play well with young leftists who don’t vote, but most Democratic lawmakers are far too savvy to risk angering the donor class, no matter how much they insist that these fat cats need to “pay their fair share.”
They claim to be champions of the working class but mock actual blue-collar Americans as backward bigots at every turn. They claim to be pushing back against a “war on women” but censor the very word “woman.” They clutch their pearls at Trump’s disregard for “democratic norms” but have no qualms about plans to create new blue states or pack the Supreme Court.
Democrat state legislators take group pictures on private jets, even as they and their Hollywood friends party maskless at the Met Gala.
You’d better not try any of that. Let your mask slip slightly below your nose as you wrestle with your carry-on, and you’ll be booted off the plane in a heartbeat. It’s your fault, of course. If you wanted to fly maskless, you should not have flown commercial. If you wanted to enjoy the Gala without a sweaty rag over your face, you should have snagged a spot on Anna Wintour’s guest list.
Or, if you can’t be one of the elites but still want to enjoy their special privileges, you could consider being a member of a group they like; one that allows them to virtue signal without facing any real consequences. Haitian migrants fit the bill, and so 15,000 of them are allowed to walk across the southern border without so much as a nasal swab. Meanwhile, if you fail to present your vaccine paperwork, you’ll be out of a job.
The upper crust don’t care about the border caravan because none of those migrants will end up moving into their gated communities. They love the poor and downtrodden, of course, but there are zoning laws for a reason. Nor do they care about crime. Looting, rioting and defunding the police — they’ll cheer all of it on. There’s no crime where they live, at least the violent kind (remember Bernie Madoff). If the police are defunded, they can always pay for private security to keep the riff-raff off their lawns.
Our elites and their Democrat lackeys care about climate change, COVID and economic inequality, but only until these causes inconvenience them. They actually may believe they are building a better world but in reality, they are simply constructing a world in which they do as they please while the rest of us chafe under their every caprice. If we object, that’s just evidence of our moral deficiency and of their right, and indeed their duty, to keep us in line.
Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.
