Why do Americans dislike taxes? Because they are racist, says Ethan Porter, writing in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas: "Some of it is racial; your tax money, says the subconscious of many American voters, isn't just wasted on overpriced toilet seats and money for the poor–it's wasted on poor people who don't look like you."
This is just another example of the low opinion in which the left-wing American elite holds the American public. First it was Slate's Jacob Weisberg complaining of " the childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large."
As George Will put it Sunday in another context: "There you have the premise of this legislation and the core of today's liberalism: the American people are such dopes they can't be counted upon to buy their own insurance."
Or as I say in that Daily News piece today: "The same folks who think poor people can't be trusted to know what health insurance to buy or whether to buy it, or what mortgage or credit card to use, also want to tell poor people what they should or shouldn't drink."
It's a shame Mr. Porter, a former national communications director of the College Democrats of America, goes that route, because the rest of the article actually goes on to make two somewhat intriguing and substantive tax-related suggestions -- first, that the government send taxpayers a receipt for their tax payments explaining what the money was spent on, and second, that taxpayers be given expanded options to make additional voluntary tax payments directed toward federal programs of their choice.
I don't deny the the existence of racism in America, but to describe it, without any evidence, as a significant motivating factor in anti-tax sentiment in America seems to be a classic example of how the "progressive project," for which Mr. Porter claims to be a spokesman, actually has contempt for the regular people it is supposed to be on the side of.
If you are curious who is behind this Democracy journal, the list of luminaries is here, including a raft of Harvard professors and Goldman Sachs alumnus Eric Mindich. The journal's president, Andrei Cherny, was a Harvard undergraduate around the same time I was and is running for state treasurer in Arizona.
