The Economy Cries Whenever a Rich Man Is Taxed

[from 4/14/10]

It was Benjamin Franklin, the inventor of the hundred dollar bill, who said there is nothing certain in this world except death and taxes. That simplifies by noting death is just your last and deepest tax. Your tax for having taken up space and used the Earth is to be put back into it. To put it another way, it's your tax for having been personally taxing on the rest of the planet. It's only a shame it's not a progressive tax, and it's assessed on such an unfair and haphazard schedule. People who take more than their fair share should go sooner. The poor and parsimonious should at least get a proportional pass, based on use.

If death were a use tax, I figure the average poor person scraping by at the poverty level in America should get to live about twice as long as someone at the median income level, and roughly 1,000 to 10,000 times as long as a billionaire.

But not to worry, you billionaires, because I care about you and don't really want to see all of you dead by age one week. So in my perfect world, rich people could buy death abatements from poor people. Let's say you make a quarter million per year before taxes. That would be enough to buy fifty years of extended life, five each from ten different poor people, and still leave you with enough to live on. Combined with your pre-existing allotment, that would even everything out. Of course, you'd be poor, too, by then, but that would be your choice.

Alternatively, you could get credits for working to extend the lives of the poor. For example, you could give health care to people who can't afford it. Then we let you live longer, too. A win-win-win all around.

Having said all that, it will probably surprise some of you that I'm all for the current WA State Legislature's plan to tax the bejeezus out of stuff poor people like, like candy, beer, soda pop, cigarettes, fuzzy dice, microwave burritos, scratch tickets, and paintings on velvet. (I'm not sure about all of those, not having read the proposal.)

I'm thinking how much worse the alternative would be. We all know that the only alternative to making poor people more miserable than they already are, is to make rich people give the state some of their money. We can't do that because to make rich people give the state any money would hurt the economy.

In fact, it hurts the economy so much when rich people have to give up any of their money, we shouldn't tax rich people financially at all. No income taxes, no estate taxes, not even sales taxes. If you can prove you're rich, you should even be exempt from sales and property taxes, because taxing the rich hurts the economy, and that hurts everybody.

Just think of what a great country this would be if only poor people were taxed. The economy would never be hurt. What a happy economy that would be!

Conversely, if we continue to tax the rich as we do, I'm afraid the day will come when we won't have any rich people. Then you'll all be sorry. You'd have no one to pay you to bus their tables at restaurants you couldn't afford yourself anymore. You'd have no one to pay you to clean their toilets after exploding them. What will you do, work at a candy manufacturing company?

Without rich people, who would buy all the high end merchandise that is priced forever out of your reach? No one, so that merchandise would stop being made and marketed, and you wouldn't ever be able to not buy it again. We're not just talking mansions and yachts here, we're talking Lamborghinis, Lear Jets, and major league teams. You and your neighbors would have to put on your own ball games and risk driving to them in Hondas, or take the bus. The horror.

World of Hurt

New research has found that poor Americans hurt more than rich. I personalized the news, as always. "I'm poor. I hurt all the time. Yes! It's true! I'll be your Poster Child of the Marriage of Poverty and Pain!"

[Left: Pained poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (no relation), and typical prescription drug abuser, said, "Opium - opium - night after night! — and some evenings even opium won't do."]

The researchers based their findings on a one day 24-hour reporting from 4000 Americans selected by Gallup as representative. (A sign of just how representative they were: I was not among them.) They analyzed the data looking for possible causes. One cause: Grunt labor is bad for you in terms of resultant pain; desk work not so bad.

They pointed to a disparity in the distribution of pain relievers. What do you know? Rich people in America get all the pain pills they want, and poor people don't!

A Michigan study in 2005 found drug stores in poorer non-white neighborhoods stocked inadequate supplies of prescription pain killers. It didn't explain the finding. I have no choice therefore, but to make crap up.

Here, then, to carry my personalization of these news items one step beyond, is the 2008 Copyright Dr. Wes Browning Study of Racial/Ethnic/Class Disparities in the Distribution and Availability of Prescription Pain Killers.

[Above right: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an educated white man able to pass for rich, had easy access to opiates.]

My study's method consisted of listening to poor people, mostly Real Change vendors plus some bus riders, talking about the troubles they have getting pain killers when they go to ERs or clinics, and from going to ERs and clinics that serve poor people like myself and listening to what goes on.

Here's my chief finding: If you look poor, or you are too dark-skinned, you are suspected of being an addict or a dealer. More precisely, that you either have what they call an addictive personality, or you are a hustler who knows lots of people with addictive personalities and you will sell your opioids to them rather than use them yourself, preferring to eat up your profits in high living and whoring.

I don't know about anyone else, but I can't imagine enjoying a whore while in intense pain. But apparently it's the general consensus of the medical and pharmaceutical community that drug hustlers can either fake pain to get pills they don't need or else have a superhuman ability to endure pain for profit, and to use whores. Oddly though, all drug hustlers present themselves as poor or dark. There aren't any of them capable of faking being rich white people.

[Above left: Bela Lugosi, another typical suit-wearing white morphine addict.]

My study includes the following analysis of my central finding. I find that as poor people and the dark-skinned have less access to pain killers to start with, it therefore comes about that when they do have to ask for them they are reduced to pleading. And people who plead are seen as overly needy. Whereas, rich people never have to plead for pain killers, because they know they have the resources to "shop around."

So what we get is a vicious circle. The poor don't get the pain treatment they need, so they need it more, so they are believed less and their motives are impugned more.

The vicious circle turns into a reeling outward spiral when the poor realize that the only option they have left is to self-medicate. They do, and they get caught doing, and the next time they go to the ER they have a record that confirms the addictive personality assessment that was only a guess originally.

It's a mess. The drug war needs to be lifted just so we can sort out who really needs what.

[Right and righter: Typical rich white present day prescription drug addict.]

Bonus Reeling Activities

1. Do you personalize news? What you most likely thought when the FLDS was raided: a. "I'm safe because the Constitution was made for sweet conformists like me." b. "I couldn't be a polygamist. I have never fantasized about a three-way." c. "Tomorrow, cops will beat my door down."

2. Annoy a friend at random. Pick something they like, like chocolate, lying around, sudoku, whatever, and use it to accuse them of an addictive personality. It's fun and easy!

History of the Poor, Part I

As this great Nation prepares to change, it's time for us all to look at the lessons of the past for inspiration and guidance in changing. A particularly important part of history is the economic part.

Usually, when someone proposes to talk about economic history, they mean the history of making and spending money. But to waste space today, I would like to talk about the opposite, namely the history of not making and spending money. I want to talk about the history of poverty.

The poor have always been with us. According to Amos, a minor prophet, the going price for a poor person in Israel ca 750 BC was a cheap pair of sandals. So you know they had poor people in fairly large supply. In fact they had so many poor people that they made it a practice to talk of THE poor, as opposed to this poor guy or that poor guy.

[Above: A pair of sandals and change.]

In those days, the poor were mainly used to determine who was a good person or not. If you treated the poor justly you were good. But if you showed favoritism, by, say, not lashing them when they stole bread, that showed you were in need of correction. The idea that you might favor poor people may sound strange today, but in those times it was the equivalent of Populism.

The poor were so numerous in Biblical times that they became the cool people. Jesus hung with them, and there were poor-wannabes. To satisfy the people who wanted to be poor but couldn't quite go the extra mile it took, a new category called "the poor in spirit" was invented. Just like today's categories of "middle class" or "black" or "zen", anybody in those times could say they were poor in spirit. No one could disprove it. Especially since they had no surveillance cameras.

[Above Right: Jesus with poor homies and wannabes.]

It was the practical Romans who said "let's get real" about this and first defined poverty. They called it paupertas and had ways to measure it. You had to empty your pockets and they'd count your cash and tell you if you qualified. In some cases they would just take your word for it. That has come down to us as the rule of "in forma pauperis" by which you can get some relief by swearing a "pauper's oath." The point was, they had a definition, so they could always check if you were lying.

In the Middle Ages there was a period beginning around the 13th Century when there was some confusion of beggars with the poor. Monks would take vows of poverty and go around begging (the word "beggar" comes from the name of such an order) and people would get annoyed (especially at fakers among them) and take their annoyance out on all the poor. Things got so far out of hand that by the 16th Century the Council of Trent had to get behind the virtues of owning property, to stem the tide of mendicants.

[Left: Typical faking fake beggar, ruining it for real beggars everywhere.]

For many centuries the idea of poverty was mainly of concern to churches and courts. It wasn't until the late 1800s that sociologists came up with the term "underprivileged." To understand this term you have to know that the word "privilege" really means "private law." In other words to have privilege is to have laws on your own personal side. So the underprivileged are people who have less of that. In other words, it means, "poor in laws." Recognizing that there could be such a thing was a great leap forward which required the invention of many new college departments and degrees.

When I was growing up in the 1950s the poor divided neatly into three categories. There was 1) the Salt Of The Earth poor. That was your basic Appalachian poor, your coal miners, your sand farmers, and such. There were 2) the vagabonds and the hobos. And there were 3) minorities.

Then, Ronald Reagan was elected president, and invented homelessness. And here we are.

Pooky For President

People often wonder how I can be so cheerful all the time. After all, they observe, I am dirt poor. Also I don’t have any compensating assets. Also Dan Quayle is running for president. Then there are the things that they don’t mention, like my brain-implant, remote controlled by Ted Turner and Jane Fonda, or the fact that David McCallum hated being thought of as Ilya Kuryakin.

Well! What keeps me going is my friends — especially my extraterrestrial friends, whom I know will some day, soon, come in force to vanquish my enemies and create an all Man from U.N.C.L.E. channel.

Meanwhile: Dan Quayle’s candidacy has motivated one of my best friends to enter the presidential race himself, so that there can be a “clear alternative” to Quayle.

“I’m not an alien at all,” Pooky Glax is quick to point out, “as much as fifteen percent of my birth probably occurred in Idaho, New Mexico, and Disneyland.”

In fact, Mr. Glax, or Pooky, as he prefers that I call him, is proud to call himself an Extraterrestrial-American. He is a sentient life-form of the quantum-disturbance type. He is over forty, at least fifty percent of the time, but don’t try to pin him to an age or he just might lurch through a wall!

I met Pooky Glax a few years ago when we were both homeless in the University District. Even back then I was deeply impressed not only by the depth of his ideas but by his deep compassion for his fellow sentient beings. Such as, when he dumpster-dove for transistors Pooky always saved out dill pickles and donuts for me, even though he had only half a pocket to put them in. That’s noble!

It’s probably not surprising that, given his background, Pooky assigns such a high priority to making housing more generally available in this country. (He favors a rotation plan.)

Though Pooky may not technically be an alien, he must constantly feel marginalized in a world that will always have far more certainty than even his own boundaries. Or at least parts of him must feel that way at different times and places. Thus, much of his platform naturally expresses his own personal struggle against that certainty of our world that so violates Pooky’s diffuse sense of being.

Take for example his call for universal bagpipes. If you ask him for clarification, Pooky chitters, and forms what passes for a grin on his presenting surfaces. Then he says it louder, “UNIVERSAL! BAGPIPES! [Chitter! - Chitter! - Chitter!]” Clearly he does not intend to be clear on this plank.

Then there is his interest in seeing that Tahiti is eventually selected as the site of a future Winter Olympics. On the face of it, this would seem to be a quite definite goal, although one that certainly should not concern the President of the United States of America. But then Pooky talks about where Tahiti might be towed, once they have learned to really trust us, and all sorts of possibilities emerge.

What would be the consequences of a national licensing of ducks? Who knows? And that puts Pooky firmly in his element.

Pooky Glax’s most radical proposal: a random national wage, so that everyone who works can, as he says, know from time to time what it means to have their work undervalued. Characteristically, Pooky declines to say how a random national wage would be implemented.

“Chitter!” is his only comment, but the impression I get from talking to him about it is that the implementation would be very confusing to everyone, in somewhat the same way that our current system now is so confusing to janitors and others like them who have to clean up after it every day.

Pooky says to me, “people think they need more certainty in their lives,” as a large fraction of his right side flickers and momentarily tunnels to Prague and back, “but actually they need less. I hope that during the course of the coming campaign I will be able to convince them of this: that in our time, the less sure we are, the better.” And he continues, “If we go where we are sure, at best it will be like a life in line at Disneyland, never getting on a ride. Is that what you want? Just to be sure that Mickey will say Hiya, Hiya, and shake your hand, before you die?”

I suppose I should mention that Pooky is not always so predictably in support of uncertainty. He is definite in his insistence that the Food Stamp Program be expanded to cover glass, transistors, computer chips and other silicon products, every third Thursday, in prime numbered years.

And of course, as you could have predicted, Pooky promises that if elected he will seek federal funding to bring about an all Man from U.N.C.L.E. channel. So he has my vote... as we knew he would!

Bronze This!

Speaking of people bribing Real Change vendors to vote for Bob Dole -- did any of you out there know that I am a vendor? That's right! I don't just write this junk I PUSH IT ON THE STREETS! And, although my legal residence is an alley, I AM A REGISTERED VOTER!*

So make your bids today! Send cash, check or money order and a note telling me who to vote for, Bill Bob or whoever, to (c) Dr. Wes c/o this rag. The largest bid wins a beautiful framed certificate promising my vote to your candidate. All losing bids accompanied by SASE will be returned, and those not will be kept! I promise!

The Following Is An

Unpaid Poetic Advertisement

We're open daily from nine to six

For accepting all your electoral picks!

No candidate will be considered absurd -

We'll write him/her in! We give you our word!

Hurry! Don't delay! Send your checks in today!

Buy our vote NOW! It's the American Way!

(* I've been asked to explain how this can be. OK, the trick is to tell the truth. "Gasp, no!" Yes! E.g., when registering, if you live in a doorway tell the County which doorway. Then give them your mailing address.)

Recently the StreetLife Gallery was invited to set up a show at the park by the Darth Vader Building at 4th and Lenora. We got permission from the landlord, Martin Selig himself, famous big-time Seattle Developer. Ironically, many of the participating poor and homeless artists had been ejected from the same park in the past, and probably will be so in the future. This, and the knowledge that people who don't look poor are not generally run out of the park, and the consequently doubly offensive statues of poor people sitting on the park's benches, inspired a poem.

The Park by the Darth Vader Building at

4th & Lenora, or Opus 31 1/2, I Hate the Park by the Darth Vader Building, or

Opus 32 1/2, The Printable Version

Pretty park by a shiny glass building!

I WILL stay and eat my fries, why not?

The flies stay, THEY got no pass;

I set my ass down by the bronze bag lady.

Made artistically she tells the likes of me

"Feel free to stay, I'm welcome, you must be, too".

So I DO stay to eat my fries, why NOT?

Then the Man comes to say "This park's not yours,

You THINK you can sit ANYwhere outdoors?

You don't WORK here I don't know your FACE,

I'll tell the COPS to kick you OUTta this place".

Pretty park by a shiny glass building -

Pretty people with pretty power wanting -

To eat pretty lunches for a pretty hour -

OH YES -

I WILL stay and eat my fries - and THAT'S WHY.

Martin Selig's bronze poor people tell me Selig really loves the poor - speechless and immobile.