After America - Mark Steyn [34]
In 2009, Ken Rogulski of WJR Detroit reported on a federal aid “giveaway” at the city’s Cobo Center:
WJR: Why are you here?
WOMAN #1: To get some money.
WJR: What kind of money?
WOMAN #1: Obama money.
WJR: Where’s it coming from?
WOMAN #1: Obama.
WJR: And where did Obama get it?
WOMAN #1: I don’t know. His stash. I don’t know. [She laughs.] I
don’t know where he got it from, but he’s giving it to us, to help us.
WOMAN #2: And we love him.
WOMAN #1: We love him. That’s why we voted for him!
WOMEN (chanting): Obama! Obama! Obama! [They laugh.]
WJR: ... and where did Obama get the funds?
WOMAN #2: Ummm, I have no idea, to tell you the truth. He’s
the President.57
Well, he got it from me, and from you. Every dollar in Obama’s “stash” comes from me, you, or the Chinese Politburo. And redistributing it on the grounds above only inflates these ladies’ blithe assumptions. But so what? If the object is to increase government, and expand the power of those in government, then the “Obama’s stash” route works just fine.
By contrast, if you fall into the taxation category and you’re stuck with the tab for Obama’s stash, you’re not only paying for groups that get a better hearing in Washington, but ensuring that the socioeconomic conditions of the republic will trend, mercilessly, against you. The small business class—men and women in unglamorous lines of work that keep the Flownover Country going—are disfavored by the Conformicrats. They are occasionally acknowledged by our rulers with rhetorical flourishes—“tax cuts for working families”—but, on closer inspection, these “tax cuts” invariably mean not reductions in the rate of income seizure but a “tax credit” reimbursed from the seizure in return for living your life the way the government wants you to, and expanding the size of the dependent class.
United States income tax is becoming the twenty-first-century equivalent of the “jizya”—the punitive tax levied by Muslim states on their non-Muslim citizens. In return for funding the Caliphate, the infidels were permitted to carry on practicing their faith. Under the American jizya, in return for funding Big Government, the non-believers are permitted to carry on practicing their faith in capitalism, small business, economic activity, and the other primitive belief systems to which they cling so touchingly.
In the Islamic world, the infidel tax base eventually wised up. You can see it literally in the landscape in rural parts of the Balkans: Christian tradesmen got fed up paying the jizya and moved out of the towns up into remote hills far from the shakedown crowd. In less mountainous terrain where it’s harder to lie low, non-Muslims found it easier to convert. That’s partly what drove Muslim expansion. Once Araby had been secured for Islam, it was necessary to move on to the Levant, and to Persia, and to Central Asia and North Africa and India and Europe—in search of new infidels to mug. I’m not so invested in my analogy that I’m suggesting America’s Big Government shakedown racket will be forced to invade Canada and Scandinavia. For one thing, everywhere else got with the Big Government program well ahead of America and those on the receiving end long ago figured out all the angles: in the Stockholm suburb of Tensta, 20 percent of women in their late forties collect disability benefits.58 In the United Kingdom, five million people—a tenth of the adult population—have not done a day’s work since the New Labour government took office in 1997.59
America has a ways to go in catching up with those enlightened jurisdictions, but it’s heading there. As Congressman Paul Ryan pointed out, by 2004, 20 percent of U.S. households were getting about 75 percent of their income from the federal government.60 As a matter of practical politics, how receptive would they be to a pitch for lower taxes, which they don’t pay, or for lower government spending, of which they are such fortunate beneficiaries? How receptive would