Billionaire Tom Perkins wants you to feel the pain of those poor 1-percenters.
By
The über
rich are full of ideas. Not ideas to help humanity, unfortunately. They’ve
thought up new ways to help themselves grab more money and power at our
expense.
Take Tom
Perkins. He’s one of a growing number of the put-upon rich — billionaires who
grabbed a fabulous fortune by hook or crook but now complain that they are
victims of a “rising tide of hatred.”
Excuse
me, Tom, but the words “billionaire” and “victim” aren’t a natural pairing.
Yet,
even though he candidly concedes that he lives a life of vulgar excess, Perkins
wrote a sob-story letter to the editor The
Wall Street Journal published
in January. In it, he pleaded for relief from the “war on the American 1
percent, namely the ‘rich.’”
What’s
needed, he explained, is a slight tweaking of America’s democratic election
system.
“The Tom Perkins system,” he lectured, differs from
the current one because “you don’t get to vote unless you pay a dollar of
taxes. But what I really think is, it should be like a corporation. You pay a
million dollars in taxes, you get a million votes. How’s that?”
Gosh,
how did he cram so much vanity and ignorance into only three sentences?
Apparently,
no one has informed Tom that poor people pay a larger percentage of their income in various taxes than
privileged tax evaders like him.
Nor does
he seem aware that a democratic government cannot be anything like a
corporation, for government must serve the whole public, while a corporation is
an autocratic hierarchy that serves only a few.
And
golly, Tom, why should you and all of your billionaire buddies get anything
special — like extra votes — just for paying taxes? What you get in return for
taxes is what we all get: civilization.
OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator,
writer, and public speaker. He’s also editor of the populist newsletter, The Hightower
Lowdown. OtherWords.org