Molly Ivins February 25AUSTIN — Ah, My Boy Buchanan has got them chasing their tails now. Goodness, what an uproar. Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole has stepped forward to save the GOP from the ravaging hordes of class warriors, the Great Unwashed, the peasants with pitchforks who are about to overthrow the established order. And those are just the Republicans. In a further loony-tunes loop (don't you just love politics?), Dole, the old grump, is now casting himself in the role of Sweetness and Light. He wants to Bring Us Together, he says, in the great tradition of the Republican Party. Sure, the party that ran Sen. Jesse Helms' campaign against Harvey Gantt, the party of the Southern Strategy, Lee Atwater, the race card, the soft-on-crime ploy — that political party. We are, you recall, setting aside for the nonce (one of my favorite periods of time) the news that My Boy Buchanan is a racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic anti-Semite — although I should warn MBB that if he doesn't stop this gay-bashing, there'll be no one left to design the uniforms. Now that MBB has introduced to a startled political world the notion that millions of Americans have, in fact, noticed that they are getting shafted while the rich get richer, the R's are regrouping valiantly. National party chairman Haley Barbour (it's so Republican to have two last names) has sent forth word that this unpleasant economic phenomenon is the "Clinton recession." Of course, wages have been stagnating for 20 years now and downsizing dates from the Bush recession, but a political year always brings out a certain joie de vivre concerning the facts. Barbour lays it all at the feet of high taxes and big government. You must admit that this is a jovial change from the R's Denial Phase. For years, they've been denying that most people have to work harder for less, that the Reagan years lifted all yachts and sank the rowboats, that the poor were getting poorer and the middle class was going nowhere. Median family income is lower than it was in 1990, according to Stanford economist Paul Krugman. Meanwhile, USA Today said last week, corporate profits rose 115 percent in the last four years, and investors in the stock market have seen their net worth grow by 109 percent during the past five years.
For years now, this has felt like a debate with Lewis Carroll's Red Queen. You'd say what was happening, and the Republicans would say, "It is not!" There were days when I just wanted someone to hand me a flamingo so I could play croquet. Meanwhile, here's some good news on the economic front. You may recall that President Bill Clinton, who is never above stealing a good idea, borrowed Jack Kemp's notion about empowerment zones — giving special tax breaks and other incentives to companies that locate in poor, urban areas. The interesting twist is that early bidders for these goodies are foreign companies. Knight-Ridder reports that firms from Malaysia, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom have either bit or are nibbling at the bait. Hey, we'll take their money. Clinton wants to put another $2 billion into enterprise zones. Makes sense — if they're going to sell it here, why not make it here? Saves transportation costs, and the feds kick in loans and a rebate on wage taxes. CROW CONSIDERED HERE: Some of the beloved readers failed to grasp the for-example part of the example used in a recent column on the flat tax. I compared taking 10 percent of $10,000 to taking 10 percent of $100,000. This sent some supporters of the flat tax into a tizz: Didn't I realize that incomes as low as $10,000 would be exempt? Don't I realize that Steve Forbes is proposing 17 percent? And so forth. Yes, I do realize all that; I used 10 percent because it's a nice round number, and even those of us who got lost in how to divide fractions in the fifth grade can generally handle 10 percent. It was an example, see? Sorry if I was unclear about that. One reason that the Forbes flat tax is so unfair, in addition to exempting unearned income, is that it ignores payroll taxes, which are seriously regressive. It is possible to write a much fairer flat-tax plan. Those who are interested should consult Chapter 5 of "Reclaiming Prosperity," edited by Todd Schafer and Jeff Faux. It's put out by the Economic Policy Institute — the subtitle is "A Blueprint for Progressive Economic Reform," and the contributors are some of the best progressive economists around. *** Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. COPYRIGHT 1996 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
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