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Tag: tax the rich
Overly Privileged Tucker Carlson Says Homeless Should 'Get Jobs Or Leave'

Overly Privileged Tucker Carlson Says Homeless Should 'Get Jobs Or Leave'

When it comes to the face of smug and punchable white privilege, no bigger one comes to mind than that of Fox News' white nationalist propagandist Tucker Carlson. The far-right rabble-rouser was born into vast privilege and wealth, with a father who served as a United States ambassador and a mother who was a wealthy heiress. Carlson also attended elite private schools and most likely never worked an honest, middle-class job in his entire life. But that certainly hasn't stopped the fake news host from smearing the working poor and homeless so as to manipulate his audience into ignoring the larger (and REAL) problem: billionaires, unchecked corporations, and professionlai liars like Carlson.

During a recent segment on his Fox News program, the pompous twit whined about the homeless issue in America.

“Everywhere, at every intersection, there are beggars. This is what we used to imagine India was like. But this is not Calcutta. This is New York, San Francisco and Austin, Texas. So the question is, what happened? And the short answer is our leaders did this," said Carlson. Adding, "Politicians are making it much easier to be a homeless drug addict in the United States, and much harder to be a law-abiding member of the middle class. What’s the effect? Well, let’s see. The middle class is dying, and we now have record numbers of drug-addicted vagrants.”

And since he simply can't stop being a dick, as former Daily Show host Jon Stewart famously said to his face, Carlson said that the homeless should have their "tents hauled to landfills and told to get a job or leave."

Carlson might want to heed his own words and get an actual job.

Watch the segment below:

We Need To Tax The Rich — Not Punish Them

We Need To Tax The Rich — Not Punish Them

Taxes are how we raise the money needed to run government. The rich have the wherewithal to bear most of those costs. These points are especially connected at a time when the rich have gotten so much richer and the government needs to do so much more.

But in making the case to raise taxes on the wealthy, it is counterproductive to portray such a scenario as a kind of just punishment for those who have accumulated wealth. Many on the left can't stop themselves from hurting their cause.

It's true that America's billionaires added $1 trillion to their pile during President Donald Trump's four years. But though the 2017 tax cuts mostly benefited the richest investors, a growing concentration of wealth has been going on for decades. So, raise taxes on these guys because they have the money and not because they are supposedly greedy or otherwise in need of moral teachings.

The pandemic did especially nice things for Silicon Valley companies that helped stay-at-home Americans move their shopping and working online. They didn't create the pandemic. They just happened to be in the right businesses when it hit.

Thus, there was no good reason for the Institute for Policy Studies and others to fulminate against "pandemic profiteers," a list heavy with tech entrepreneurs. The dictionary defines profiteer as one who makes "an excessive or unfair profit, especially illegally or in a black market."

What exactly made Zoom founder Eric Yuan one of the pandemic profiteers? Yuan had no idea when he created his videoconferencing service in 2011 that nine years later, economic shutdowns and social distancing would create a huge market for his invention and make him a billionaire several times over.

Liberals should bear in mind that many of the biggest donors to President Joe Biden's presidential campaign are the very billionaires on whom he wants to raise taxes. They include the top people at the likes of Facebook, Google and Apple. One of them, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, saw his net worth, now $17.4 billion, rise 61 percent in the Trump years.

Also note that several factors influence rich people's view of taxes. Some feel morally obligated to help support the society that has done so much for them. Others consider it very much in their interests to have good roads, ports and internet — things their taxes pay for.

The "fairness" argument does remain valid. The wealthiest Americans have received enormous tax breaks while having the ability, in many cases, to set their own number for taxable income. By contrast, the working stiffs see their taxes automatically deducted every week from their paychecks.

That makes Biden's plan to beef up the IRS to go after tycoons who chisel on their taxes long overdue. IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig has said that tax cheats deprive the government of something like $1 trillion a year.

Just don't blame the honest economic winners in the pandemic for the hardships of others. New York State Sen. Luis Sepulveda, who represents a working-class area of the Bronx, implied as much when he said, "It makes me angry because in the wealthiest city in the world, it's inexcusable to have such a high rate of unemployment in one area."

His largely immigrant constituents did not lose their service jobs because rich people lived elsewhere in the city. They lost them because a deadly virus shut down the businesses that employed them.

So, there's no need here to spin a morality tale about the evils of great wealth. The case for raising taxes on those who could most easily pay them is good. Let's stick to this more sophisticated argument and skip the reproach.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.