Like many Americans, I sat down last week to figure out how deeply I was going to be buried by Bill Clinton's new avalanche of taxes. And like others who went to the same trouble, I was dumbfounded.
My wife and I are short of the $140,000 in taxable income at which new income tax rates kick in (we're so short of it I think we're on a different ladder). We aren't Social Security recipients with a taxable income of more than $44,000 either. But we are commuters, prime targets for Clinton's draconian new gas tax increase.
We drive about 70 miles a day to and from work. Our car averages about 28 miles a gallon. The gas tax is going up 4.3 cents a gallon. That comes out to almost 11 cents a day.
That's right, 11 cents. Although I'm no high-roller, that's still less than half what I tip my barista, the guy who pours my morning cup of cappuccino on Main Street.
But these little taxes do add up, so I computed how big a bite this was going be over the course of a year. My cheapo calculator read $28. I tried it again. It still read $28, about the cost of a month's cappuccino.
And for this, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Dole and Larry Craig expect me to rise up in anger, smiting my members of Congress and any other fool crazy enough to support such a confiscatory plan?
That tells you something about their incomes, as well as mine.
Actually, Clinton did want more from me than this legislation takes. He started out calling for shared sacrifice to bring down the deficit, and he proposed an inclusive energy tax, not just on gasoline but on all energy. That tax would reduce the deficit while it encouraged efficiency at the same time.
The energy tax was the first thing to go, though. It would destroy America's economic competitiveness, the Limbaughs, Doles and Craigs said.
At about the time Clinton was being forced to cave in to this argument, I was paying nearly $4 a gallon for gasoline, much of it in taxes, to drive in one of the countries with which we compete economically. It is also a country in which electrical energy, now mostly nuclear, is so expensive light switches automatically turn off in hotel hallways.
Standing at the gas pump, or trying to get the key into the door lock before the light went out, I could only laugh at the proposition that we wouldn't be able to compete if we raised our energy costs.
But back home, they weren't laughing. When Rush hollers that Clinton and his wife the evil Hillary are coming to get you, all the dittoheads (that's Limbaugh's word, not mine) recoil on cue.
Then they call their members of Congress, apparently. Probably fewer than 5 percent of them are going to pay more in new taxes than I am. (How many full-time workers have the time to listen to weekday talk shows anyway?) But somehow they have been gulled into believing that what's bad for Rush, Bob, Larry and the other patrons of German car dealerships is bad for them.
Now watch; when the deficit fails to shrink in the face of this weak tea they helped water down, Rush, Bob and Larry will turn around and say, ''See, we told you it wouldn't work.''
But only for a short time. Most of their wind will be saved for the next con job, which is that we don't want health care reform.
Skyrocketing doctor and hospital bills? Who cares. Can't switch jobs because you have what insurance companies call a pre-existing condition? Stay put. Afraid that no matter how much you save, it won't be enough and you will end your years in a nursing home on welfare? That doesn't matter.
What matters most to all you dittoheads isn't any of those things. You know what you want most from our medical system?
Choice of doctors.
Forget the cost, the flintheartedness, the insecurity. Don't let Bill Clinton and Hillary, booga booga! take away your right to choose your own doctor.
Call your members of Congress today. Tell them we can't have the national health plan every other industrialized nation except South Africa has. Not only would it take away our choice of doctors, but it would destroy our economic competitiveness.
