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![]() Just Above Sunset
September 18, 2005 - The Weekend's Election
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Tuesday, September 13,
this, along with a flood of articles in German, arrived in Hollywood from Ric Erickson, editor of MetropoleParis: Saw the album of hockey photos. From here in Hollywood,
back to Paris – Curling. When living
in Canada, and worn out from a long day at work managing a team of twenty odd computer folks at the locomotive factory, I
would sit quietly in my hotel room and watch the all-curling channel. It was an end-of-the-world all-hope-is-gone so-this-is-exile
thing. I cannot imagine photographing curling. December 2001 I caught some curling on television in my hotel room in Paris
- in German, from Switzerland. A walk across the street to the Flore for a cognac fixed that right up. There was no such place
in London, Ontario. Well, I didn't work through
the German articles as I said I would. I was able to read German for about a week, long enough to pass a reading comprehension
test in graduate school after a six-week intensive summer class, but that was decades ago. I've lost that all. Until recently, Merkel,
the leader of the center-right Christian Democratic Union party, enjoyed a healthy lead over incumbent Gerhard Schröder, whose
Social Democrats are listing after eight years in office and a growing national malaise. Yes, that's the reason
there are any articles at all on this side of the pond. American conservatives need a Teutonic Margaret Thatcher person to
prove what the claim about how the world should be run is right - a sort of anti-Chirac, someone who will get Germany revving
up economically to prove their point about cutting taxes for the rich and services to the poor and going to war without any
direct threat for abstract reasons. A hero would be nice - or a heroine in this case. They miss Reagan's ballsy British sister
in unfettered low-tax screw-the-needy capitalism and elective war (remember Grenada and the Falkland Islands wars?) - so this Merkel dame is the darling of the guys who run the United States now.
What with the hurricane embarrassment and the nearly three hundred dead in the streets of Baghdad this week, her winning this
thing would raise their spirits. The first clue that the
flat tax is an unwelcome import: The Germans, who have a word for everything, don't have one for the flat tax. They
call it the "flat tax." Ah, there, like here, turning
to the theorists is always a bad idea. Remember the Laffer Curve - USC economist Arthur Laffer's idea that the more you cut
taxes the more money pours into the government because the economy grows fast due to those lower taxes. Neat idea. Wonderful
concept. Since the Reagan administration this has been the core economic theory of the Republican Party. Of course it's never
worked, and there is good evidence it never will. But it's a great theory. It sounds like it could be so. See Samuel
Johnson on the triumph of hope over experience. Substitute evidence for experience in the phrase. Of course note that the
Republican Party is not big on the idea empirical evidence matters - consider global warming (the evidence is mixed, folks),
evolution (the jury is still out on that, as Bush has said), democracy in Iraq (it could happen in a sort of way, maybe,
if we stay the course), Terri Schiavo was not brain dead at all (Doctor/Senator Frist said so on the senate floor). So with
tax cuts. They could fix everything. You never know. And there is talk in the right-wing think tanks that maybe we
shouldn't tax income at all, only consumption, with a national sales tax, or a value-added tax (VAT) like some countries have.
That way, the richer you are, the smaller the portion of what you pay in taxes! No one pays any income tax and Joe, the struggling
Wal-Mart clerk, pays twenty-eight percent extra for a quart of milk, and so do you! Cool. Germans tend to see progressive
income-tax rates as part and parcel of a democracy. The notion that a secretary would pay the same proportion of her income
in taxes as a CEO doesn't strike Germans as egalitarian, it strikes them as unjust. What's more, the trade-off of taxing consumption
rather than income seems counterproductive in a nation where the lack of domestic demand is a continual problem. Germans need
more incentives to consume, not fewer. What's more, they don't
like pie-in-the-sky experts: In the United States,
the involvement of professional economists, Wall Street executives, and CEOs in political campaigns and the formulation of
economic and tax policies is not only accepted, it's preferred by both parties. Not so in Germany. Although Germany has more
than its share of world-beating, world-class companies - Siemens, DaimlerChrysler, SAP, and BMW, to name a few - its CEOs
possess little juice. At a moment where there is a wide perception that the political system can't adequately address Germany's
economic problems, there is still no room in Germany's political life for a Ross Perot, a Robert Rubin, a Paul O'Neill, or
a Larry Lindsey. No wonder German executives are perpetually gloomy. So what does Merkel do?
Wednesday she comes out and says, "Our program says nothing about a flat tax." |
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This issue updated and published on...
Paris readers add nine hours....
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