Marie Cocco: Only Little People Pay Taxes

[marmar]

from Truthdig:


Only Little People Pay Taxes


Posted on Aug 23, 2007
By Marie Cocco

WASHINGTON—It’s odd, this urge I have to mark the passing of Leona Helmsley. The diva of a hotel empire whose abrasive arrogance was given a full public airing during her tabloid-terrific trial on tax-evasion charges in the late 1980s died earlier this week at 87. Her epitaph: the Queen of Mean.

Nostalgia for New York City is a common affliction among those of us who once made our homes there. It drives an entire industry built upon the memory of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and infuses people with the determined outlook that somehow life on the Lower East Side was better when it was an immigrant ghetto than it is today as a gentrified enclave for suburban college students in search of a cool nightclub.

There is an awful lot to legitimately miss about New York without resorting to a gauzy glance back at the 1980s, a time when the very rich —always a source of curiosity and perverse civic pride—held cultural sway. Wall Street rose up as a way of life instead of as a mere industry. Real estate barons such as Helmsley and her husband, Harry, were titans. Donald Trump was building his career as a developer, investor and political player—viewed as a savior of struggling municipal projects or as an instigator of self-enriching sweetheart deals, take your pick. This was before Trump became a caricature of himself for TV.

Average New Yorkers gained little from all this money sloshing up and down the avenues. The trickle-down economics of the Reagan era didn’t turn the aging subways around, fill the potholes or shore up the bridges. Public investment of all kinds was starved in part because of deep federal budget cuts.

So when a former housekeeper testified at the queen’s trial that Leona Helmsley once told her that “only the little people pay taxes,” something snapped. It was as though the decade had been unmasked for what it was: an era of individual rapaciousness, backed in good part by government itself.

How could we know that two decades later that sound bite of selfishness—“only the little people pay taxes”—would become public policy? ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070823_only_little_people_pay_taxes/

[fasttense]

1. No truer words were ever written.

"How could we know that two decades later that sound bite of selfishness—“only the little people pay taxes”—would become public policy?"

[midnight]

2. So those schooled in the Leona Helmsley fashion are at the Helm.

O how reassuring to the rest of us little people who make a living.