Money Men Say, Voters Move Over, It's Not Your Election!

Especially tax policy.

Bernstein was quoted in one of the most important stories of 2015 -- an investigation by The New York Times into how tax policy gets written. Unfortunately, this complex but essential report appeared between Christmas and New Year's and failed to get the attention it deserves. Here's the heart of it.

With inequality at its highest levels in nearly a century and public debate rising over whether the government should respond to it through higher taxes on the wealthy, the very richest Americans have financed a sophisticated and astonishingly effective apparatus for shielding their fortunes. Some call it the "income defense industry," consisting of a high-priced phalanx of lawyers, estate planners, lobbyists and anti-tax activists who exploit and defend a dizzying array of tax maneuvers, virtually none of them available to taxpayers of more modest means...

Operating largely out of public view -- in tax court, through arcane legislative provisions and in private negotiations with the Internal Revenue Service -- the wealthy have used their influence to steadily whittle away at the government's ability to tax them. The effect has been to create a kind of private tax system, catering to only several thousand Americans.

That "private tax system" couldn't have happened without compliant politicians elected to office by generous support from the donor class. As the right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife put it: "Isn't it grand how tax law gets written?"

Sam Pizzigati knows how it happens. He's been watching the process for years from his perch as editor of the monthly newsletter Too Much! Reminding us in a recent report that "America's 20 richest people -- a group that could fit nicely in a Gulfstream luxury private jet -- now own more wealth than the bottom half of the American population combined, a total of 152 million people," Pizzigati concludes that one reason these and other of America's rich have amassed such large fortunes is that "the federal tax rate on income in the top tax bracket has sunk sharply over recent decades."

So here's the real value of all that campaign cash and lobbying largesse: underwriting a willingness among legislators and government officials to bend the rules, slip in the necessary loopholes and look the other way when it comes time for the rich to hide their fortunes.

This is the status quo to which the donors cling so tightly and clutch their pearls at the prospect of losing. But now, with Trump seemingly ascendant, some of those who might have been relied on to support a donor revolt are betraying Brooks' call for a coup, weakening in their resolve and beginning to think that maybe the short-fingered vulgarian isn't such a bad idea. Despite his populist brayings, they hope, he might well be brought into their alliance.

Which brings to mind a line from the movie version of the musical Cabaret. In pre-Third Reich Germany, the decadent Baron Maximilian von Heune is talking with the British writer Brian Roberts, explaining why the elite have allowed this Hitler fellow to get a jackboot in the door. "The Nazis are just a gang of stupid hooligans, but they do serve a purpose," he says. "Let them get rid of the Communists. Later we'll be able to control them."

We all know how well that turned out.