Schwarzman benefits
from the so-called "carried interest rule" loophole: financial sharks typically
take their compensation in the form of capital gains rather than salaries, thus
knocking down their income-tax rate from 35% to 15%. But that's not the only way Mr. Skin-in-the-Game
benefits: the 6.2% Social Security tax
and the 1.45% Medicare tax apply only to wages and salaries, not capital gains
distributions. Accordingly, Schwarzman
is stiffing the system in two ways: not only is his income-tax rate less than half
the top marginal rate, he is shorting the very Social Security system that
others of his billionaire colleagues, like Pete Peterson, say is unsustainable
and needs to be cut.
After the biggest
financial meltdown in 80 years and a consequent long, steep drop in the
American standard of living, who is the nominee for one of the only two parties
allowed to be competitive in American politics? None other than Mitt Romney, the man who says
corporations are people and whose effective rate for federal taxes, at 14%, is
lower than that of many a wage slave.
Opposing him will be
the incumbent president who must raise a billion dollars to compete. Much of that loot will come from the same
corporations, hedge-fund managers, merger-and-acquisition specialists, and
leveraged-buyout artists the president will denounce in pro forma
fashion.
The super-rich have seceded from America even
as their grip on its control mechanisms has tightened
That wealth-worship -- and
a consequent special status for the wealthy as a kind of clerisy -- should have
arisen in the United States is hardly surprising, given the peculiar sort of
Protestantism that was planted here from the British Isles. Starting with the Puritanism of New England,
there has been a long and intimate connection between the sanctification of
wealth and America's economic and social relationships. The rich are a class apart because they are
the elect.
Most present-day
Americans, if they think about the historical roots of our wealth-worship at
all, will say something about free markets, rugged individualism, and the
Horatio Alger myth -- all in a purely secular context. But perhaps the most notable 19th-century
exponent of wealth as virtue and poverty as the mark of Cain was Russell Herman
Conwell, a canny Baptist minister, founder of perhaps the first tabernacle
large enough that it could later be called a megachurch, and author of the
immensely famous "Acres of Diamonds" speech of 1890 that would make him a rich
man. This is what he said:
"I say that you ought
to get rich, and it is your duty to
get rich. " The men who get rich may be
the most honest men you find in the community.
Let me say here clearly " ninety-eight out of one hundred of the rich
men of America are honest. That is why
they are rich. That is why they are
trusted with money. " I sympathize with
the poor, but the number of poor who are to be sympathized with is very small. To sympathize with a man whom God has punished
for his sins " is to do wrong " let us remember there is not a poor person in
the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings."
The conjoining of
wealth, Christian morality, and the American way of life reached an apotheosis
in Bruce Barton's 1925 book The Man Nobody Knows. The son of a Congregationalist minister,
Barton, who was an advertising executive, depicted Jesus as a successful
salesman, publicist, and the very role model of the modern businessman.
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