Wednesday, August 15, 2001

Besides that, Mrs. L., how was the play?

By DAVE HAMRICK
Editor-at-large

I don't usually like to answer letters to the editor, mainly because it's too easy to get caught in a revolving door that never goes anywhere.

But Timothy Parker managed to draw me out last week with his treatise on the previous week's column.

A couple of minor points: For some reason, folks like Mr. Parker seem to feel that anyone who disagrees with their point of view is spewing venom. And the picture he paints of Fayette Republicans giving me (or is it Bush? I'm not sure) the Hitler salute is also a common retort from those who don't have an argument.

Now for more weighty points in his letter.

One item I must deal with, just so other people with thought processes similar to his won't get the wrong idea, is Mr. Parker's mistaken assertion that I had suggested American taxpayers today are worse off in general than the serfs of Medieval times.

How ridiculous! Actually, the ridiculous was just what I had in mind. But I'm not going to give you the whole answer to the puzzle here. Do a little work for yourselves and look up "hyperbole" in the dictionary.

As to some of his other points, he accuses Republicans of seeking "to shift the tax burden down." Hmmm, let's see now, eliminating the income tax burden entirely for the 3.9 million working people with the lowest incomes is shifting the burden down. Providing an average of almost $1,500 a year in tax relief to 38 million families with children is shifting the burden down.

I'm glad you explained that to me.

In fact, people who make a whole boat load of money will indeed be seeing their taxes lowered by many times the $1,500 those working families will receive. And why is that? I'll try not to shout here ... those who make the most money are paying almost all of the taxes.

See, no exclamation point, no capital letters, no bold face. I'm remaining calm.

Of course, the column for which I'm being lambasted was a column that actually criticized the style of tax cuts the Bush Administration has given us, but for some reason my antagonist thinks I'm going to be upset if he characterizes the privileged life that Dubya has lived.

Here's that excerpt for your enjoyment. He refers to Bush as "a white boy, born to wealthy parents, educated in private schools, enrolled at Yale as a legacy with a 1200 SAT, given a National Guard pilot training slot otherwise unattainable in a war, who then fails to even complete his commitment, enrolled at Harvard Business School with less than stellar academic record, does nothing significant for 20 years, becomes a baseball owner and somehow governor of Texas and then purchased the presidency (but not the popular vote) by big business."

Putting aside the exaggerations and the grammatical errors, my response is: "And your point?"

I suppose there's something in there somewhere about how high taxes should be and how large government should be, but I can't find it.

Finally, there's this business about whether the Revolution was about who was taxing us or how high the taxes were ... not that it would affect the main point of the argument either way. True enough, King George did try to mollify the colonists by last-minute, desperate cuts in the taxes he imposed. And our leaders probably were more concerned with their hatred of the crown than with the level of taxation.

But those farmers and shop owners wouldn't have picked up their muskets and marched against the best army in the world if that crown hadn't been causing them some pain.

Now, of course, we increasingly have the same situation. Washington is as far away from the average citizen in terms of understanding as England was in terms of distance. And Washington increasingly is usurping the authority of our duly elected local governments and imposing its will. But that's a whole 'nother column.

Just for the record, the point of the column was my contention that our nation needs to take a good, long look into the future and decide whether we are going to be a nation with a strong central government that is involved in every facet of our lives, a nation with high taxation and very little individual freedom or responsibility, or a nation with a limited central government that restricts its activities to protecting our rights and freedom, and a nation with low taxation and a high degree of individual freedom and responsibility.

I find myself in a position of sympathy with our regular letter-writer Gunther Rückl. Gunther has been trying to turn me into a socialist, and in the process of carrying on a continuing dialogue, I'm starting to really like the guy.

But he was in a state of mild despair the other day because he is trying to present a lot of data and a lot of arguments, and many of the letters we print in response to his letters simply attack him rather than dealing with his arguments.

Now I know what you mean, Gunther.

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