Time and again we've observed that the Bush administration and the GOP don't just want to cut taxes. They are in fact gripped by an ideological obsession to eliminate progressive taxation itself, and shift the tax burden as much as possible away from income earned by inheritance and investment to income earned through work. This obsession is important to understand because it explains why Republicans are willing to borrow trillions of dollars to finance tax cuts that are doing little or nothing to make the economy grow and threaten a fiscal disaster that undermines even the Bush administration's priorities at home and abroad.
But don't take our word for it. Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, super-lobbyist and close ally of the president, has come forth with a glimpse into the unrestrained id of conservative ideology. In an interview last week on Terry Gross' National Public Radio show Fresh Air, Norquist actually compared the morality of taxing the rich at higher rates to the Holocaust. Here's what he said:
NORQUIST: The argument that some who play to the politics of hate and envy and class division will say is, "Well, that's only 2 percent -- or, as people get richer, 5 percent, in the near future -- of Americans likely to have to pay [the estate tax]." I mean, that's the morality of the Holocaust: "Oh, it's only a small percentage. It's not you; it's somebody else." And [in] this country, people who may not make earning a lot of money the centerpiece of their lives -- they may have other things to focus on -- they just say it's not just. If you've paid taxes on your income, government should leave you alone, not tax you again.
GROSS: Excuse me one second. Did you just compare the estate tax with the Holocaust?
NORQUIST: No, the morality that says it's okay to do something to a group because they're a small percentage of the population is the morality that says that the Holocaust is okay because they didn't target everybody. "It's just a small percentage, what are you worried about? It's not you. It's not you. It's them." And arguing that it's okay to loot some group because it's them, or kill some group because it's them -- and because it's a small number -- has no place in a democratic society that treats people equally. The government's going to do something to or for us; it should treat us all equally. And the argument that Bill Clinton used when he wanted to raise taxes in 1993 is "I'm only going to tax the top 2 percent, so this doesn't affect the rest of you. I'm only going to get some of these guys, not you, others."
The challenge there, when people use that rhetoric -- in addition to the fact that I think it's immoral to separate the society -- but when South Africa divided society by race, that was wrong. When East Germany divided them by income and class, that was wrong. East Germany was not an improvement over South Africa. Dividing people so when you can mug them one at a time is a bad thing to do. Whether you do on racial grounds, religious grounds, whether you work on Saturdays or not grounds, economic grounds.
GROSS: So you see taxes as being, the way they are now, a terrible discrimination against the wealthy, comparable to the kind of discrimination of, say, the Holocaust?
NORQUIST: Well, when you pick, when you use different rhetoric, or different points for different purposes, and I would argue that those who say "Don't let this bother you, I'm only doing it -- the government is only doing it -- to a small part of the population," that is very wrong. And it's immoral. They should treat everybody the same. They shouldn't be shooting anyone. And they shouldn't be taking half of anybody's income or wealth when they die.
The most interesting thing about this exchange isn't that Norquist succumbs to the insensitive and intellectually lazy habit of cheapening the Holocaust with disproportionate analogies; this is a lamentably common trait of zealots on both ends of the ideological spectrum. Nor is it surprising that his all-consuming hatred of government drives him to compare taxation with "looting" and "mugging" instead of a means for covering the cost of the government and public enterprises without which most of the rich would never get rich -- from infrastructure, to a legal system, to public education, to retirement security, to international trade, and ultimately, to freedom. What's stunning is that Norquist views progressive taxation not as a debatable but time-tested method for financing government, but as a crime against human rights that's fundamentally the same as racial or religious discrimination.
This country has maintained a progressive system of taxation for nearly a century. The great post-World War II U.S. economic boom was accompanied with tax rates on high earners and on estates far higher than those prevailing in recent decades. The great 1990s boom, which created the largest upper class -- and the first mass upper-middle class -- in human history, was accompanied by the tax rates that George W. Bush has been so obsessively flattening and shifting since he took office. Yet Norquist views this fiscal tradition as one of the great injustices of the 20th century.
No one in the Bush White House would be so impolitic as to echo what Norquist said in this interview. But as we reported in a recent issue of Blueprint magazine, it's scary how close to the Republican mainstream his views have become.
Progressive taxation is one of the great bipartisan traditions of the last century. And that's why it's fair to wonder if the Bush administration is determined, as a matter of ideology and even morality, to take us back more than a century to the economic and fiscal policies of Karl Rove's beau ideal, William McKinley -- when the rich did not fear jackboots in the night.
