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“B,” as everybody calls him, is above average in income, energy, brains, age, height, citizenship, generosity, spoken words per minute, and ability to cuss out selfish bastards. He also scores high on enjoyment of life, devotion to family, and books read (the man reads books as though he were eating popcorn). Talking with him is kind of like getting hit by a tidal wave.* He’s the only eighty-four-year-old we know who lives life at 95 mph. The reason we’re using him in this chapter on class warfare is to demonstrate not only what Bush’s economic and tax policies are doing to you but what they are doing for people in B’s income bracket.

Here’s the way he looks at it. “You make fifty thousand dollars a year, you pay nine thousand in income taxes—that doesn’t put you in the poorhouse, but it sure as hell tightens your budget. I make a million dollars a year, I pay four hundred thousand in income taxes—that leaves me six hundred thousand to live on. That doesn’t cramp my lifestyle. I’m still rich. You gonna feel sorry for me?”

Rapoport does not put his money in offshore banks to avoid paying taxes. His daddy escaped from a Siberian prison camp in 1905, and B proudly keeps his father’s membership certificate in the Socialist Party of America on his office wall. David Rapoport worked as a peddler, selling blankets off a cart in the poor “Mexican” neighborhoods of San Antonio (the Mexicans having been there a lot longer than the Anglos, of course). He never made more than $4,000 a year. “Yes, we were poor!” says B, in his usual explosive style. (You have to envision an exclamation point at the end of all of his sentences.) “But we didn’t know we were poor!We were rich in everything that counted! We had books and education, and we listened to opera on the Victrola, and people would come over almost every night and talk about the state of the country and the world!”

B went to public schools in San Antonio, then, in the depths of the Depression, to the University of Texas. Tuition was $25 a semester. “I paid three hundred sixty dollars a year, for room, board, books, everything. I worked six days a week and I never saw a football game. I love football.” B, a former chairman of the university’s board of regents, now sits on the fifty-yard line at UT football games.

B’s great desire was to be a college professor, but he dropped out of graduate school in economics and worked in a jewelry store in order to help send his sister to Columbia. In 1942 he met Audre Newman on a blind date and proposed to her over breakfast the next morning. They started a jewelry store in Waco but were soon sidetracked by Homer Rainey’s campaign for governor. Rainey had been president of the University of Texas until he was fired by a spectacularly know-nothing board of regents. In 1946 Rainey ran for governor in one of the most memorable campaigns in Texas history. B and Audre put all their savings, $2,000, into the campaign and then borrowed another $3,000. They campaigned tirelessly while trying to keep the jewelry store going. Rainey carried McLennan County (Waco) but lost the election, leaving B and Audre heartbroken, disillusioned, and hellaciously broke. B drifted into selling insurance and turned out to have a knack for it. With help from Audre’s uncle, B started his own company, American Income Life Insurance. He still gets up at five every morning, reads, plays tennis, and is at the office before everyone else.

OK, so he makes all this money—what’s he going to do with it? He has a nice house, but it’s no mansion. This is Waco, for God’s sake: it’s a fifties ranch-style. Good news! His wife of fifty-five years loves good clothes and jewelry and dresses beautifully. Alas for conspicuous consumption, Audre is one of the great bargain shoppers of all time. She would consider it an absolute scandal to pay full price for anything, and she finds the most gorgeous stuff for ten, twelve bucks. It’s an art, it’s a science. She shops Loehmann’s and Filene’s Basement (“back in the days when it was really