Why the Tea Party Wants America to Be the Next Greece

How did the U.S. get to be the world’s economic and military superpower? Taxes.

A very interesting article in the November issue of Vanity Fair explains how. After the nation pulled victory from the jaws of defeat in the Revolutionary War -- in large part due to loans from the Netherlands and France -- Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton realized that no country can rise to the top without good credit, which is based on the power to tax its citizens. If a government doesn’t have tax revenue it can’t get loans. (Could you get a loan with no steady source of income? No.)

“Good credit made the United States the dominant world power of the 20th century,” write the article’s authors, Simon Johnson and James Kwak. “Whether it will ever force the federal government to default or not, the Tea Party and the conservative tax revolt behind it are chipping away at the fiscal foundations built by Hamilton at the dawn of the Republic.”

And if they succeed? Well, we have seen the future and it is...Greece. Hardly anyone in Greece pays taxes -- especially not wealthy Greeks. As Britain’s Daily Mail pointed out last June, in a country of 12 million people, only 5,000 admit to earning over $140,000 a year. “Manipulating a corrupt tax system, many simply say that they earn below the basic tax threshold of around $15,700 a year, even though they own boats, second homes on Greek islands and properties overseas.”

Sound familiar? The U.S. tax system is much less corrupt than Greece’s -- but it is easy to manipulate. That’s why multimillionaires here pay a far lower tax rate than the people who deliver their mail and pick up their garbage.

Here’s something else we have in common with Greece: average folks out holding protests to rail against taxes. Which is crazy. As the Daily Mail notes, “These protesters should direct their anger closer to home -- to those Greeks who have for many years done their damndest to deny their country the dues they owe it.”

The influencers behind the Tea Party, the tax revolt and its champions on Capitol Hill -- people like the billionaire Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch -- would like us all to believe we can balance the books through spending cuts alone. That’s simply not possible. Not without severe reductions in everything from Medicare to Social Security -- and a U.S. much weakened on the world stage.

But it seems they’re willing to make that deal. As long as they don’t have to give up their boats, their second (and third and fourth and fifth) homes, their properties overseas. And their record corporate profits.

(President Obama, a Tea Partier and a CEO are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table is a plate with a dozen cookies. The CEO reaches out and takes 11 cookies, then looks at the Tea Partier and says, “Watch out for Obama. He wants a piece of your cookie.”)

Practice what you screech. The foot soldiers in the tax rebellion are fond of yelling about fiscal discipline. But do they practice it themselves? If you assume that these are average Americans, you can do some extrapolation and deduce that many of them are up to their Uncle Sam hats in debt.

Research by Card Hub shows U.S. consumers racked up  $18.4 billion more in credit card debt in the second quarter of 2011 than they did in the first quarter of the year. That’s up 66 percent from the same quarter in 2010 and up a massive 368 percent in the same period two years ago.

More financial numbers: The average credit card debt per household with credit card debt is $15,799. Today’s average consumer has 13 credit obligations on record at a credit bureau. Nine of them are credit cards, on average, and four are installment loans.

So much for living within your means.

And why do Tea Partiers gripe so much about taxes anyway? As pointed out last year in The Atlantic, half of the people who call themselves Tea Partiers make under $50,000 a year, which means they pay zero income tax.

Steve Jobs: the rudest Buddhist. Since we never met Steve Jobs, we can’t write a “Steve Jobs and Me” piece like half the business/tech journalists have already done. But we can report that we have a friend who once delivered antique furniture to Jobs’ house in Palo Alto and our friend reported to us at the time (this was back in the ’90s) that Jobs was one of the most unpleasant people he’d ever encountered.

So maybe we should pause in the rush to beatify Jobs to think about who he really was, especially since a lot of people in the business world (like this windbag at Forbes) are glorifying Jobs’ rampant a-holery and encouraging more CEOs to be like him.

Whatever. We don’t spend a lot of time around CEOs so they can be as mean as they want, as far as we’re concerned. But we do hope they don’t go around bogusly cloaking themselves in Buddhism, the way Jobs did. There was nothing Buddhist about him, aside from his new-agey outfits and the simplicity of the products he made. (Apparently he hated clutter.)

One of the people who’s studied Jobs most closely, an actor named Mike Daisey who has a Broadway solo show all about Jobs, calls him a “brutal tyrant.” Which, it seems, he was. This column at Gawker.com presents a comprehensive catalog of the man’s vast capacity to be selfish, mercenary, and cruel. A few highlights:

• He had a daughter out of wedlock and denied paternity for years, even going to court to swear under oath that he couldn’t be the girl’s father because he was sterile. (He later had three kids with his new wife.)
  
• When he returned to helm Apple, in 1997, he axed the corporate philanthropy programs and never restarted them. There is no public record of Jobs ever giving a dime of his $8.3 billion to charity.
  
• He built all of Apple’s products in Chinese factories where conditions are a bare step above slavery and where workers toil 60 hours a week, seven days a week. Where many are children. Where many have hands crippled by long hours of repetitive tasks. A lot of Apple fans laud Jobs for the intense concern he showed for consumers, striving heart and soul to make their devices -- and their daily lives -- better. But if he really cared about people, why does Apple manufacture its products at the places it does? Unless Apple figures Chinese laborers are less worth caring about than people who can afford an iPhone. (Some say it’s necessary, to keep prices down. But, as Mike Daisey points out, the labor cost of an iPhone is about $8.)
  
• Some say Jobs cut in line to get a quicker liver transplant.

We could go on. But we won’t. Click the links if you want to learn what sort of fellow Steve Jobs was. Sure, he was a genius at figuring out how to please everyday consumers (so is McDonald’s). But c’mon, he was no Buddhist. He just appropriated the pieces that worked for him, same as he did with most Apple gadgets.