America's war on success - Bill Clinton's tax policies

Mr. Clinton is waging class warfare. If he wins, the victims will not only be the |rich.'

On June 23, Northwest Airlines was forced to pay up to settle a lawsuit brought by the U. S. Justice Department. In hiring pilots, the airline was "guilty" of favoring U.S. citizens over non-citizens. Northwest, not wanting to invest in temporary pilots or entrust them with its passengers' safety, required noncitizens to submit declarations of their intention to become citizens before considering their employment applications. The airline also required noncitizen applicants to have permanent work authorization.

Justice Department special counsel William Ho-Gonzales spotted discrimination in these sensible requirements. He extorted from Northwest,a $10,000 fine, plus compensation of non-citizens for lost salary from not being hired, plus an agreement that the airline would rewrite its hiring policies and send all its pilot-hiring personnel to government-provided training sessions to clear their minds of any presumption that U.S. citizens should be preferred for employment in their own country.

Our culture was grounded in opportunity and merit - "a career open to the talents" - and that was the basis of America's success. No more. Quotas and race- and gender-norming are shunting merit and ability aside. Indeed, in many parts of the country, it has become almost impossible for an employer who wants to hire a competent workforce to require high-school diplomas and use school grades as an indication of ability. Since such measures of individual performance tend to vary by race - a larger percentage of whites than blacks, for example, have diplomas - they have a "disparate impact" and can thus lead to a lawsuit for racial discrimination.

Many Americans have lost a substantial part of their wealth settling these phony discrimination lawsuits brought by the Federal Government and the plaintiff bar. But the suits are ultimately even more damaging to the class of people they are supposed to help. Mr. Clinton babbles endlessly about education reform, but as Michael Heise of the Hudson Institute has shown, quotas have made diplomas and good grades meaningless. Why study hard or even graduate from high school when prospective employers can be sued for relying on such performance measures? Civil-rights regulations have killed American meritocracy.

There is literally no business decision that is not now the Federal Government's business. But the case brought against Northwest significantly broadens the Justice Department's attack on the rights of U.S. citizens. White males have been sitting ducks for quite a while. Almost by definition racist and sexist in everything they do, they were stripped by the 1991 Civil Rights Act of their access to the courts in cases of reverse discrimination. But now that non-citizens have been given special rights (probably leading to quotas, as there is no other way for employers to prove that their policies do not have a disparate impact), black U.S. citizens will find that any gains they have made at the expense of whites will be lost in turn to non-citizens.

Mr. Clinton v. the Rich

The attack on the basis for America's success, however, is far more general than quotas. President Clinton propagandizes against the rich, attempting to deprive them of legitimacy. His favorite lie is that Reagan excused the rich from paying their fair share of the tax burden by cutting their tax rate. If truth were respected in public discourse, this would be a dangerous he to tell. The reason is simple. Every year the Internal Revenue Service puts out a volume, Statistics of Income, which reports the percentage of the federal income tax paid by various percentiles. The figures show that in every one of the Reagan years, the percentage of the income-tax burden borne by the top 1 per cent, the top 5 per cent, and the top 10 per cent rose inexorably. The burden on the top 1 per cent rose from 17.6 per cent in 1981 to 27.5 per cent in 1988 - a 56 per cent increase! The burden on the top 5 per cent of earners rose from 35 to 45.5 per cent, and the burden on the top 10 per cent rose from 48 to 57.2 per cent. During these same years, the burden on the lowest 50 per cent fell from 7.4 per cent to 5.7 per cent, a 23 per cent decline.

From time to time the Treasury Department puts out a news release on the IRS data, but these facts are conscientiously ignored by news organizations and Democrats. Again, the reason is simple. The bottom half, who are the audience for the anti-rich propaganda, would not believe that a tax system that falls so disproportionately on the rich is unfair - except to the rich. Unlike liberal intellectuals, the poor still have a real sense of fairness. Sticking 1 per cent of the population with between a quarter and a third of the income-tax burden and 10 per cent with almost three-fifths of the burden is raw plunder. The U.S. used to be a land of opportunity; today it is a country where if you succeed, you become a resource to be plundered.