by David Safier
(TASL) Maybe his next Comedy Central Show should be called, “Tax Ben Stein’s Money (if he’s rich enough).”
I may be the only liberal in the world who reads Ben Stein’s column in the Sunday New York Times Business section. But I do it because the man is a conservative with a heart, and a conscience, and sometimes he surprises me.
This Sunday was one of those times. He wrote a column that said we should . . . get ready . . . Tax The Rich!
Be still, my heart!
Stein, who you probably know from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Comedy Central’s “Win Ben Stein’s Money” and the Murine Clear Eyes commercials, is a lawyer and an economist with something like seven books to his name. He’s a smart guy. And a Republican. Maybe talking with all those Limousine Liberals in Hollywood (as the Republicans never tire of calling them) made him aware of the huge gap between the rich and the poor in this country. I mean, look, Arianna Huffington was an arch conservative until she started debating Al Franken on TV.
In Sunday’s column, Stein said cutting taxes won’t bring more money into the government’s coffers, and we need more money to support programs like Social Security and Medicare (I wish he’d mentioned education too, but you can’t have everything). So we need to increase taxes.
But whom to tax? The poor are, well, poor. The middle class is struggling to pay for its middle-class life. That leaves the rich. It would be lovely if we did not have to tax them. Many have worked hard for their money. Many have created useful businesses. Many of them are fine people.
But as Willie Sutton said when asked why he robbed banks, “Because that’s where the money is.” By definition, the truly rich have a lot more money than they need. If they don’t, then they are not rich by my standards. The first step toward putting our house in order, once we are past the seemingly looming recession, is much higher taxes on the truly rich and serious enforcement to prevent offshore tax evasion.
But wait. He’s not through:
To put it even more starkly, the government — which is us — needs the money to keep old people alive, to pay for their dialysis, to build fighter jets and to pay our troops and pay interest on the debt. We can get it by indenturing our children, selling ourselves into peonage to foreigners, making ourselves a colony again, generating inflation — or we can have some integrity and levy taxes equal to what we spend.
Ben Stein, you’re this Tax-and-Spend Liberal’s new best friend.
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