Speaking truth from power.
Which is always refreshing—
We interrupt this blog post to bring you an important bulletin. —See, I was gonna add value to this link to the Warren Buffet quote that’s flying all over the Islets of Bloggerhans today by digging up that old Doonesbury strip where Zonker’s in the House of Lords and they’re voting on I think it’s Maggie Thatcher’s hideously awful poll tax, or maybe it was actually voting for a upper-class tax increase which would make a little more sense given the punchline, I can’t remember which, so anyway I go to the handy dandy Doonesbury Town Hall to punch up the full online archive of 32 years’ worth of strips so I can plug in “House of Lords” and “class” maybe (or maybe something else, it always took a couple of tries to find what you were looking for), so I could add a link to that old strip where the Lord sitting next to Zonker says, “Haven’t you ever betrayed your class before? It’s jolly good fun!” only when I got to Doonesbury.com I a) discovered it was now a part of the Microsoft family (along with Michael Savage, ain’t that a kick in the pants), and b) you have to pay to get at the frickin’ archives. Information wants to be free; cartoonists want to eat; this isn’t so much eating as putting another zero in the bottom line; why shouldn’t an artist make hay off intellectual capital; why should I pay $9.95 a year for a terribly narrow window of pop-cultural research; the tragedy of the commons; the tragedy of the tragedy of the commons, and inevitable monopolization, and the borgification of all media, and the plummeting usefulness of the New York Times as an online source—anyway, what’s important here is that more links all over the web just went dark.
So.
Fuck.
Right, right. —Warren Buffet, ladies and gentlemen:
When you listen to tax-cut rhetoric, remember that giving one class of taxpayer a “break” requires—now or down the line—that an equivalent burden be imposed on other parties. In other words, if I get a break, someone else pays. Government can’t deliver a free lunch to the country as a whole. It can, however, determine who pays for lunch. And last week the Senate handed the bill to the wrong party.
Supporters of making dividends tax-free like to paint critics as promoters of class warfare. The fact is, however, that their proposal promotes class welfare. For my class.
Jolly good, eh wot?
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