Well, Steve Forbes is now a front-runner. How do I feel about that?
First of all, here is someone who is still advocating the true-believer Jack Kemp school of cut taxes first and worry about the deficit later. We saw what that got us in the eighties -- into a record debt which our children will be paying back for most of their lives. But Steve Forbes is offering other things which it is a lot tougher to turn down.
To begin with, here is one of the few candidates on the GOP side who is really pushing term limits, and who won't let up on that. Yes, Pat Buchanan is also pushing that, but his appeal is clearly to disgruntled voters who eagerly identify themselves with the outsider, and Steve Forbes, with his call to a Reagan-style optimism, is obviously trying to summon forth a broader audience than that.
That is apparent with his call for a laissez-faire style flat tax.
Our common-sense filters warn us that of course this flat tax plan if flawed; of course this plan, once it sees the light of day, will be easily painted as financial elitism of the worse sort. After all, folks who live entirely on their investments would be able to reap a windfall from the theory that the dividends from investments should be taxed once at the corporate source and then no more. After all, once the mortgage deduction is removed, millions of middle-income home-owners will lose a deduction for which a 17% tax rate may be insufficient to compensate. After all, the removal of the charitable deduction is easily painted in the hands of a political negative advertiser as just plain un- American.
And yet; and yet...
There is little doubt that the idea of a flat tax exerts an almost hypnotic attraction when first proposed. It seems, in a quirky, idiosyncratic way, fair at first blush; and it is, in a manner increasingly popular to a population now moving with dread toward April 15, simple, oh so simple. And it is in this regard that I have always felt the strongest case can be made for this concept. I do not know how many hours the average person spends preparing his tax return, but I am sure for most people the number of hours is too much for comfort. The flat tax, with its promise of cutting that time down to something marvelous, like fifteen minutes, sings the siren song of improvement in the quality of life. And if the end result would be to charge the average taxpayer the same, or even ten or fifteen dollars more, than the current tax code, I for one would be glad to make the trade. And I am confident there are many in this country who feel the same. It is in the quality of life angle that the flat tax can make its strongest case; yet no advocate of the flat tax has stressed that aspect. Instead, we are inundated in a meaningless debate over whether we would pay more or less, whether it is fair to lower-income people, to higher-income people, to those who make their money through wages, to those who make their income through return on investments, etc. etc. This debate is meaningless because the answers entirely depend on how the flat tax is structured, and each candidate does so differently. Some advocate no deductions, with a 17% rate, as does Forbes. Others advocate retaining the mortgage and charitable deductions, and imposing a 20% rate. Still others advocate including the two above deductions, and adding a new one, rent; Jerry Brown, for one, supports that idea strongly.
What it all boils down to is that THERE IS NO CASE THAT CAN BE MADE FOR THE FLAT TAX AS SUCH. Any case made is only relevant to the particular flavor anybody is advocating. 'Flat tax' is a pretty phrase with no meaning which is being thrown about cavalierly, freely and irresponsibly.
The real attraction in the words 'flat tax' is the fact that they have become a code word, not only for change, but change as advocated by the outsider. The words have become rhetorically associated with an overall ideological stance of boat-rocker, populist, temple-smasher, etc. etc. And it is in that context that its true political power should be viewed. And this is where the true meaning of Forbes' success can be seen.
To a large portion of the electorate, myself included, the populist boat-rocker carries a strong moral attraction. We have seen our standard of living stagnate, or even regress. We have seen multinationals treat this great country as a teat to be squeezed dry of profit, and then abandoned like an old milk bottle. We have seen our leaders prostitute themselves before the God of Mammon and ignore entirely their obligation to the country at large. And we are looking for someone to come along on a white horse and chase these moneychangers out of our temple of freedom. So anyone who walks in promising to attack those parasites and purify our alter of democracy has our immediate attention and favor. In this environment, anyone who appears to be plucking the beard of some so-called elite, who appears to be running without the benefit of friendship with some putative group of powers-that-be, immediately grabs our interest. We don't see an independent, like Weicker or Perot, step forward, at least not yet. We didn't see the country's non-politician of choice, Colin Powell, step forward. So in this environment Steve Forbes positioned himself superbly to pick up that mantle. The wonder is that very few analysts saw the power of the vacuum, or realized how perfectly Forbes fit that vacuum.
And the concerns that have created that vacuum are very legitimate indeed. We may click our tongues over the demagoguery of a Prop 187 fueled by middle-class angst over job loss or the threat of job loss. We may decry the undemocratic aspects of term limits, a movement fueled by a perception that politicians now need their contributors more than their voters, and have succumbed to the inevitable law that absolute power corrupts absolutely, a perception with which I must say I am in complete agreement. But just because the proffered solutions are possibly unsound, or even immoral, does not detract from the moral legitimacy of the unease which has brought them to life.
Similarly, these feelings of unease, or even betrayal, have brought to life a hunger for a leader outside of the mainstream professional political class. Again, we may click our tongues over the lack of governmental experience of a Steve Forbes, or the wrong-headedness of a cut-taxes-first, deficit-be-damned style of economic thought which he espouses, and which brought us our current debt in the eighties. But at the same time we have to acknowledge the legitimate feelings of disillusion and anger which have propelled his candidacy to its current position of prominence.
And if anything, ANYTHING, demonstrates more dramatically that the public is more than ready for experimenting with some new, different, unconventional approach to leadership in the White House, I don't know what that thing could be. No more proof is needed that the American electorate is ready to consider an independent candidate for the White House from outside of the two major parties . Bill Bradley, Lowell Weicker, take note.
Let me know whether or not this makes sense to you. Write to me at