Bob Lord

Who says you can’t nail Jell-O to a wall? I know, you can’t literally nail Jell-O to a wall, but once in a great while you can do so figuratively by forcing a conservative to confront the glaring contradictions in his logic. It doesn’t happen often. If you’re trying to get there, always try to debate via email, because it’s infinitely more difficult to force the confrontation in a live conversation, for the obvious reason that there’s no written record of what was previously said.

Truth is, engaging in this sort of debate is an utter waste of time, but for those of you who share my glee when a conservative gets called on his bullshit, enjoy the ride. It takes a long while to get there, so bear with me. I have tried to excise the passages that are beside the point, but there remains a lot of back and forth. That was actually helpful, because you need the conservative to lose sight of his original premise in order to reach the desired result.

The starting point is an article I wrote a few months back in which I suggested that corporations were becoming too big (and too powerful) to tax. A conservative I know emails me to call into question the practice of taxing corporations at all.

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This was hilarious, sort of, if it weren’t depressing. I met one of the one percenters who sees himself as a victim.

I was at a party Friday night, and probably the only progressive there. This guy starts railing at me after I let it be known I think Obama is too far to the right. I don’t know a lot about the guy, but I’d heard from enough people how well he does that his membership in the top one percent was a safe assumption. He easily  could be in the top point one percent.

His chief complaint? The “top one percent pay 47% of the income tax in America.”

So, I asked him: “What percent of the income flows to the top one percent?” After an uncomfortable five seconds or so, another person chimed in with what he thought was the answer. The few seconds of silence, however, was long enough to make clear what I suspected. He had worked himself into a lather over the share of the income tax paid by the top one percent, without even knowing their income share.  My guess is that he heard the statistic on Fox News, from an anchor who expressed anger similar to his own. It’s one of their favorite talking points.

Of course, his anger made as much sense as being angry at your kid for getting a 50 on her math test before bothering to find out that there only were 50 points possible and the kid with the second highest grade scored a 44.

I didn’t have enough control of the discussion to do so then, but here’s what I hoped to explain to this angry one percenter, who clearly felt victimized by Obama:

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