Strange Silly Season

11/15/99

By Bryan Zepp Jamieson

Now, it could be argued that with that last criterion, there's no more point in calling it "silly season" then there is in calling the weather at the south pole "winter-like". Politics is always silly, exasperating, entertaining, aggravating, and the only game for grownups, but when I say "strange", I mean "so peculiar that nobody, not even Thomas Pynchon, could make it up".

Silly isn't the same as strange. Lenora Fulani, one of the top people in Louis Farrakhan's "Nation of Islam" announced that she was quitting to go to work for Pat Buchanan. That's just silly. It's not strange, for several reasons. First, because she's a flake. Second, if you think of the political spectrum as a circle, with mainstream moderates at top dead center, those two are so far removed in their respective directions that their butts are touching. Third, it just doesn't matter. If those two want to get together to show they have nothing in common with 95% of the voters whose support they are trying to enlist, they face a quick route to obscurity.

There's stuff that is strange but by no means silly. The vote against the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Random mass shootings in offices and schools. Hate crimes.

But this is about our strange silly season, and folks, this one is a humdinger. This week, for example, the California State GOP endorsed Willie Brown for reelection for mayor of San Francisco.

If you don't already know the nature of the relationship between Democrat Brown and the GOP, imagine that you are living in a parallel universe where no matter how swift or how far ahead he is at the start of the cartoon, the roadrunner is always caught by Wile. E. Coyote. Always. No matter what. And Wile E. always gives a little laugh before he bites the roadrunner's head off.

That's Willie Brown and the roadru... that is, the state GOP. If they weren't such a bunch of far-right jerks, you would feel sorry for them. Certainly, it's easy to see why they wouldn't like "Bad, bad Willie Brown, baddest man in the whole damn town". Just the incident with the little tins of Vienna sausages . . . but I digress.

The state GOP endorsed Brown for mayor. They did so, not out of any hope of gaining something but because the other contestant left standing for the runoff was a gay liberal comedian who won on a write-in vote after deciding to run just two weeks before the election. That just doesn't happen. It happened. He beat Frank Jordan for the run-off spot. The guy (Tom Ammiano) is very gay, very liberal, and very funny. Three strikes, and the GOP is out of its mind.

I thought the sight of the state GOP swallowing the concept of supporting Willie Brown like a canary swallowing a basketball would be the strangest political scene of the week. No, the year.

Make that a decade. Even for San Francisco, that was extraordinarily strange.

Then Donald Trump announced his tax plan.

"The Donald" is seen by a huge number of people as being the symbol of the outrageous greed and acquisitive fury of the 80s, the real voice behind "greed is good". "Doonesbury" and "Bloom County" devoted months of strips to the proposition that the man was a slimy, over-privileged pig. Sweet little old ladies would opine that "The Donald" should be hung by his kneecaps from meathooks, and smile gently as they did it.

So when the Donald announced he had a tax plan, it was assumed that he would out-Forbes Forbes for grasping self-centered greed and disdain for the working class. Grind up poor people and use them as dietary supplements for cattle, or something like that.

Instead, he proposed to soak the rich.

His plan - and at first glance, it's a stunningly good one - is to have an one-time asset tax of 14.5% on everyone with a net worth of more than ten million dollars. He estimates that the revenue from this tax would be $5.7 trillion. By an odd coincidence, that happens to be how much debt we're in since the Great Reagan Folly.

His plan is to pay off the national debt in one fell swoop, and take it from people who benefitted most from the supply-side lunacy that led to the debt in the first place.

This would have the immediate effect of eliminating 22 cents on each federal tax dollar that goes toward financing the debt. That's 22 cents that is not being used to finance coupon clippers, banks, and a shocking number of foreign investors. Some of the money could go to roads, schools, defense, and other things. Much of it could result in a tax cut that does not cheat the poor or mess over the public finances further.

As for the victims, in a worst-case scenario, someone might have to try to get by on a net worth of only $8,550,000. That's at least enough so they can eat at McDonalds every day and still have enough to rent a movie on the weekend. And with a 20% tax break, they make it all back in a few years, and after that it's gravy, right? I don't mind people getting rich, as long as they aren't cheating me to do so.

I'm not seeing a downside here. But . . . Donald Trump? "The Donald"?

I don't know where the liberals and the Democrats were on this. When we have to have someone like Trump come up with a plan like that, I begin to wonder if we still haven't recovered from the self-image of dispirited weenies that we acquired in the 70s. I mean, Donald Trump, hero to the working class? Give me a BREAK!

Now, you don't have to support Trump. But do think about what he's proposing here. It sounds like it could be a good plan, and if it isn't, it's close enough to a good plan that someone else can hammer it into something that works.

And ask yourself this: If we're Democrats, then where the hell were WE on this? Why didn't someone on our side of the fence propose this, or something like this?

Isn't that the strangest, silliest element of all in this whole column?

If we start fighting for what's right, instead of what's safe, then perhaps we wouldn't fit in so well with this strange political silly season.