May 5, 2014

GAWD, I hate the rich.

The top hats. The monocles. The dinner jackets. The way they twirl their mustaches while evicting orphans.

Before we drag them into the public square, though, we should probably define “rich.”

Amendment 87, the temporary “graduated” income tax, defines rich as earning $500,000 a year.

And yes, it is temporary. Unlike the federal income tax brackets, 87’s brackets aren’t indexed for inflation, meaning over time all of us will creep into the new top 8.4% tax rate.

Clever scam. Con Coloradans who aren’t good at math that they’re getting a tax cut and then let inflation do the mugging.

Sell a tax increase on working families as a tax cut. You can almost hear the maniacal laughter.

Rich bastards

But back to punishing the rich — those trophy-wife-collecting, umbrella-drink-swilling bastards.

Why should they drive Maseratis while I putter around in my 2010 Nissan Altima?

Sure, we use the same roads, sit in the same traffic and can reach the same destinations. But that’s hardly the point. His cup holder has Italian stitching.

Henry Ford democratized the automobile. Before mass production, cars belonged only to the wealthy. Now ordinary people can live where they can afford a home and work where they can earn a living.

Unfortunately, Ford became rich in the process. Would we have been happier if he hadn’t? Of course we would have! We’d still be stuck in tenements, but he would have been poorer. Totally worth it.

The rich get private jets. Why? I mean, I fly private too. We all do. I simply have to share my private plane with 130 strangers.

While trapped in middle seat 34B, I use high-speed internet delivered by satellites launched on private rockets. Elon Musk uses the same service on his plane too, the showoff.

Fine, he puts satellites into orbit. Fine, his rockets have rescued astronauts stranded at the International Space Station. Fine, his satellite internet has connected every remote community around the world, empowering the poorest of the poor and least powerful.

But should he be rewarded for any of that — with money?

The iPhone in Elon’s pocket is the same as the iPhone in mine. Steve Jobs helped put a supercomputer, camera, map, library, newspaper, television studio and argument factory into billions of pockets.

But he became rich, so presumably the whole project was morally suspect.

Sam Walton drove down the price of countless things working families buy. Jeff Bezos built a system that can bring those things to our doors, sometimes in 30 minutes.

But Bezos is easy to dislike because his wife is mostly plastic, or rendered by Pixar or something.

Fine, he’s easy to hate. But does his wealth matter more than the value created for us?

Class envy on the ballot

Amendment 87 has generated plenty of talk about forcing rich people to “pay their fair share.” It has generated considerably less discussion about class envy, which is doing the political heavy lifting.

“Fair share” sounds principled. “I resent that guy’s boat and trophy wife” sounds childish.

Yet the boat is doing more campaigning than the tax tables.

We rarely stop to consider how much of modern life exists because somebody took an absurd risk.

That somebody might be a famous billionaire. It might also be the developer who built your home, the employer who created your job so you can afford it or the real estate agent who found your house.

Their success is part of your higher standard of living.

I am not claiming rich people aren’t douchebags. For efficiency’s sake, let’s stipulate that every last one of them is unbearable.

The question is whether our lives are nevertheless better because of what they created.

And do we want to chase them out of Colorado as progressive income taxes have chased them out of California, New York, Massachusetts and elsewhere? Massachusetts is now dead last in the nation for new business creation. That’s our future.

What have we sacrificed in exchange for the greatest improvement in quality of life throughout all of human history?

Mostly, we have had to endure the sight of successful people having more than us.

That seems like a remarkably small price to pay.

Amendment 87 asks you to treat envy as policy and punish people we dislike, while inflation quietly expands the definition of whom we’re punishing.

The sales pitch is “soak the rich.”

The fine print is “eventually, that means you.”

Jon Caldara is president of Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.