Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [17]
B Rapoport doesn’t actually like money and he doesn’t want things like big houses and fancy cars. But he’s good at making money, and, frankly, after he sold his insurance company, he had it coming out of his ears. What do you do when you have a couple of hundred million and your wife won’t spend it and your son won’t take it? B is giving it away as fast as he can, and what’s left over when he and Audre are gone will go to their foundation, mostly to support education. He is a firm believer in the estate tax and considers its abolition both mean and stupid. “A progressive income tax is the only fair form of taxation known to man. Of course we need to redistribute income in this country from the wealthy to the poor. And right now these Republicans are redistributing it from you to me.” Aside from the chance to do more good works, the last thing in the world he needs is more money. What a friend he has in George W. Bush.
If you want to see Bernard Rapoport explode—and that’s damn good entertainment value for the dollar—get him started on rich people who not only don’t give anything back to this country but who don’t even have the decency to pay the taxes they owe. The rich and corporations that buy mail-drop addresses in the Caymans or the Bahamas disgust him. His contempt for their greed is magnificent, even biblical (Old Testament, of course). He can put the principle in both biblical and Marxist terms—remember, we’re dealing with one of the best-read people in America. The idea that those who have more owe more is so ingrained in him that he cannot begin to comprehend the silly bastards who don’t get it. That anyone who has become as rich as Rapoport could still be indifferent to the obligation to create opportunity for others is to him an impenetrable mystery and a source of galling fury. “Taxes, for God’s sake,” he raged, “are what support education!”
Suggest to B that social needs should be met by private charity, as George W. Bush maintains, and you are met with an avalanche of statistics, facts, numbers (not for nothing, all those years in insurance), ending with an abrupt and devastating damning of anyone who could be so criminally stupid as to think that will work. This student of history will take you back to the nineteenth-century poorhouses of England to demonstrate why it is a monstrous idea.
Funnel government money through religious charities? Rapoport is an eighty-four-year-old Jew who lives in Waco, the Vatican City of the Baptist Church.* The man grew up in Texas eighty years ago. He knows from anti-Semitism. The wisdom of putting a wall of separation between church and state is more than slightly clear to him.
Like any other businessman, B Rapoport can entertain with stories about the idiotic requirements of government paperwork, but if you wanted to fix that, you’d put a B Rapoport in charge of it. He didn’t get rich by wasting his time or anyone else’s. He also understands that government, properly used, is the great engine of social justice; that without it, the capitalist system, under which he himself has so richly benefited and which he wholeheartedly supports, will simply run haywire from greed and unfairness.
B is an old man now. He’s been working for social justice for a long time, for a system that will let more of the sons of pushcart peddlers in the barrios become multimillionaires. One hesitates to use the word, dis-couraged, about B Rapoport. Let us say rather that his righteous rage is larger than it was a few years ago.
How has Bush II affected him? Let us count