Dreaming About Big Cars and Tax Cuts

It was politics, not the smell of gas and burnt rubber, that lingered in my head as I grazed at the annual car show recently at L.A.'s downtown Convention Center. Tens of thousands flocked to the main exhibition halls to kick the tires of the newest Chevys, Caddies and Camrys. But the real human traffic pileup occurred in the smaller Concourse Hall, set aside for the top drawer in motoring vehicles.

I stood like a squeezed sardine as throngs panted over quarter-million-dollar yellow Lamborghinis, red Ferraris and the ultracool Azure series Bentleys. There was barely room to breathe as the crowd elbowed one another away to snap digital pictures of the gleaming machines.

And this was no creamy elite (they need go no farther than their own driveways to appreciate a $280,000 Testa-rossa). No, this was strictly the hoi polloi, el pueblo, the regular folks, in cutoffs and baggy pants and fanny packs and T-shirts. There was a slightly pornographic aspect to the whole scene. Like a youngster thumbing through National Geographic, or a teenager peering at Playboy, these voyeurs were salivating over exotica they'd love to explore but somehow knew they'd never quite get there.

Or do they? Extravagant wealth is both scorned and admired in America and not always in equal measure. Even the poorest among us secretly, and often not so secretly, sometimes convince ourselves that one day soon . . . well, you know the rest. This is what underlies many of the idiosyncrasies of American politics. Slam the rich -- but not too hard, because one day I intend to be one of them.

How else can one explain the nonchalance with which the American people stand by and so passively watch the ongoing accelerated transfer of wealth in this country from the bottom upward? For surely in a more politically sophisticated, more class-conscious country, President Bush's recent economic speech would have been met at the very least by outraged citizens throwing open their windows and furiously beating on pots and pans, by marches of protest, and perhaps a torchlight rally in front of the White House.

But not in America, where CNN's Lou Dobbs and other media gargoyles fawn over the smirking Bush as if he were some sort of philosopher-king. Bush's "plan" -- I wince just writing that word -- to provide increased "jobs, growth and opportunity," as he put it, is but one more bald-faced gimmick to further enrich the rich. Excuse an additional automobile metaphor, but if your car engine blows a head gasket, you don't fix it by charging a new set of chrome wheels on your MasterCard.

Some 10 million people are unemployed across the country right now. Not in decades has national job loss mounted so quickly as in the last two years. Wages are once again leveling off and even dropping. More Americans than ever have no health insurance. The elderly can't afford prescription drugs. Even the professional classes can't afford spiraling college tuition. Doctors walk off the job, unable to pay for malpractice coverage.

But what does Bush propose? Not only speeding up his $1.6 trillion favor-the-rich tax cuts already passed by Congress, but an additional cut in taxes on stock dividends. On stock dividends! Will those of you who earn more than a thousand, no, make that a hundred, dollars a year in dividends now raise your hands?

Fact is, some 40 percent of all stock dividends in this country go to only 2 percent of the population. A full quarter of the benefits included in the Bush dividend tax cut will go to those who earn more than $1 million a year. So if Reaganomics was correctly dubbed "trickle-down," then the Bush approach is more akin to "piss-on-you" economics. About the only measure missing now from the Bush plan would be a proposal to make monthly payments on yachts, vacation homes and Lamborghinis tax-deductible. Indeed, aren't they owned by what the CNBC commentators and the White House like to call "our most creative and productive citizens"?