In a message dated 1/16/03 11:57:03 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: >AdmrlLocke wrote: > > > >> The farmer felt no compunction at all about complaining that while > >under the income tax system he pays no tax, under a sales tax he'd pay > > >a hefty tax. He pays nothing and he thinks he's entitled to pay > >nothing while everyone else pays something.) > > > >This kind of rhetoric never seizes to amaze me. Why do people get away > > >with it?
I'm tempted to say that it's because America is dominated by WASP culture, and WASP culture promotes polite and confict-aversion over confrontational truth. I don't really think, however, that that fully explains why such people don't get confronted more, although it might explain much of that particular story, since I was sitting in a WASPy country club in small-town Iowa. :) I think that in America certain groups of people have gotten benefits because, deservedly so or not, many other Americans believed that the beneficiaries deserved the benefits. Much of the Great Society--occasional liberal protestations to the contrary notwithstanding--appealed to urban/suburban Northern white middle-income guilt over the treatment of blacks in America, particularly (but not exclusively) during slavery. These voters believed (rightfully so) that blacks had been oppressed (slavery, Jim Crow, etc.) and that therefore someone should pay them, or their descendants, something (a rather tenuous conclusion, I'll admit, and the one behind the 'reparations' movement these days). These voters also saw having the government make these payments as an easy, cost-free way (a decidedly false assumption) to expiate their guilt for evils perpetrated by other people. Until the Great Society's heavy costs (inflation, welfare-dependence, destruction of black neighborhoods and families) started to appear clearly in the 1970s, very few of these voters felt any desire to criticize the programs, or the recipients who developed an entitlement mentality, or feared to express such criticizms for fear of being branded "racist," as the Democrats routinely do and have done since the 1960s. In the farmer's case, there's a centuries'-long American love-affair with rurality and the famer. We start with the early colonial stories of America as a great garden, the Jeffersonian ideal of the sturdy yeoman farming his land, the American notion of the farmer as the "salt of the earth," the non-economic notion that the farmer "feeds us" (as though out of the goodness of his heart for us poor, starving urban dwellers). Indeed a hostility toward the sick, polluted, direct city and preference for the clean, growing countryside goes back to pre-colonial English (and Continental) roots. Farmers in America tried for decades starting in the late 19th century to get various types of government benefits, but only when their relative numbers had declined to less than half the population could they actually manage to start squeezing out some small benefits in the 1920s. Now that less than half of a percent of the US population engages in full-time farming, taxpayers can afford to exempt farmers entirely from federal income taxation, pay then individually tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars, and yet barely notice. For decades it hardly seemed worth the effort to debunk the noble farming myth in order to cut agricultural price subsidies, although in the mid-1990s the Democrats' allies in the media made cutting ag subsidies the key test of whether Republians were really serious about cutting entitlements. (Note: Republicans did phase out the notorious ag price supports [though not all federal ag subsidies] but got not credit from the news media, whose members conveniently forgot they'd set up ag subsidies as the key test). Civil War veterans, however, stand out as the first group to create a sense among the voters that they deserved to feed at the federal trough, and for the next half-century or so got increasingly large and wide benefits. Eventually Congress passed what some have called a "Sneeze Clause" or something like that: if a Civil War veteran ever sneezed in your direction you got veteran benefits. I understand that veterans today still get substantial, wide-ranging federal benefits, thought I'm not at all sure that having a separate, completely-socialized medical system doesn't hurt them much more than it helps. > > > >Here in Denmark, we often hear similar rhetoric on welfare benefits. If > > >someone in the media is advocating a reduction (or more likely, > >advocating a lower increase) in welfare benefits, the interviewer will > > >gladly turn to someone, who will say: “I actually receive welfare > >benefits, and I think they are too low”. That’s it – end of > >discussion!! > > > >The general feeling is: “Well, this guy actually receives benefits, so > > >he’s gotta be the expert, right?” – “on the other hand, the idiot who > >proposed the cut (lower increase) doesn’t receive them, so who is he to > > >say anything about how high they should be…” > > > >Whenever the similar line of argumentation is presented in tax > >matters: “Hey, let’s ask the top income earners whether they think > >rates are too high” (63 percent at the moment here) – the opinion of > >such “fascist pigs” is dismissed out of hand as biased… > > > >Is this experience shared by people outside the Scandinavian > >countries? – how about the US? > > > >sorry if this is off-topic > > > >Jacob Braestrup > >Danish Taxpayers Association Yes, we tend to have the same problem here, though I think Americans still have a bit of the traditional classical liberalism that founded the republic as part of their inclinations, so such accusations and complaints don't, I think, carry quite as much weight here. They do still, however, carry a great deal of weight here. DBL
