Presidential candidate Donald Trump demands "the biggest (fudging) pizza you've ever (gol darn) seen, right in my (mouth.)"
I did my taxes yesterday, which went about as smoothly as a freelancer with multiple sources of income and virtually no records could reasonably expect. Between the self-employment tax and my ongoing, catastrophic failure to be married or own a home, I wound up giving back just over 36% of my adjusted gross income. For over a third of my working life in 2010, I worked for Uncle Sam.* 
And what did I get for my money? With no children in public school, no realistic hope of enjoying Social Security or Medicare, and little material interest in our decade-long project to educate/explode everyone in Afghanistan, I enjoyed few direct benefits. But it must be noted that the broader American system profited me indirectly. My dividend came in the form of civil liberties, the rule of law, Ke$ha, and all the other wonders our functioning governments make possible. Today is tax day, and it seems as good a moment as any to take a look at the America we bought with our hard-earned dollars. By “we,” I mean “those of us who make too much money to get free food stamps or medical care, but not enough money to induce Congress to give us a tax cut.” We’re the middle class, everyone loves us and is therefore free to treat us badly, and this is the Friday we paid for.
Perhaps giving up that fat slice of your steaming income pie has made you resent the federal government, and you would like to see it broken as quickly as possible. In that case, you will love the news that Donald Trump has tied for first among potential Republican presidential candidates in a national poll. Trump and Mike Huckabee were each the favorite choice of 19% of respondents, with Sarah Palin polling second at 12% and third place going to a star-devouring black hole. Between the thrice-bankrupted combover victim, the former morbidly obese evangelical minister and the pathological liar who couldn’t bear to be governor of Alaska, I guess I’ll go with Charlie Church. I hope you’ll support him, too, because I must warn everyone right now that if Donald Trump becomes President of the United States, I will go on a kill-crazy rampage. Seriously, I will walk outside and murder everyone I do not recognize with my hands, and I will not stop until I am captured or apologized to. Donald Goddamn Trump.
It’s possible I’m overreacting, since people like Trump pretty much run the government already. Just in time for the GOP’s ongoing, 30-year outrage at the terrible burden placed upon the rich in this country, the Willamette Week—which really missed an opportunity to name itself the Willamette Gazamette—has published this fun list of tax facts. The whole thing is an exercise in surprise followed by despair, as one might expect from the opening observation that, since 1980, the average income of the bottom 90% of Americans has increased $303, or 1%, while the average income of the wealthiest one-tenth of 1% went up $22 million, or 403%. My personal favorite, though, is this: a single person making the national median wage of $26,000 in 2009 paid 23.4% of his income in taxes, whereas the average member of the 400 richest households in the country paid 16.9%. Also, during the George W. Bush presidency, IRS data on taxation of the 400 wealthiest American households was classified a state secret.
We should probably preserve this system, though, because otherwise the rich and powerful would be forced to screw the poor and average manually. That’s what Daily Variety is doing to the Vandals, the venerable LA punk band that got a cease-and-desist letter for parodying the magazine’s logo on the Hollywood Potato Chip album back in 2004. The Vandals changed the album cover and stopped using the image, but it can still be found on third-party internet sites—which Variety publisher Reed Elsevier has made the basis of a lawsuit filed in Delaware, apparently for nuisance purposes. A judge in that district has sent the case back to California, but Reed Elsevier continues to try to extract a kabillion dollars from the broke dudes who made this song, all because they failed to supervise the internet.
Here, then, is a country gone retarded. The obvious solution, as LZ Granderson explains at a sixth-grade reading level, is to stop dumb people from voting. “Should ignorant people be allowed to vote?” he writes in fucking Newsweek. “A provocative question for sure; however, I’m not bringing it up for shock value, but rather to give us all pause.” Oh, not to shock us—to give us pause. I am perhaps being too harsh on Granderson, who rightly points out that the storied ignorance of the American electorate has made idiots into a valuable swing bloc, bedumbening our political discourse accordingly. He fails to identify exactly who these ignoramuses are, however, and the difficulty of doing so is a minor flaw in his plan that you only notice if you think about it for more than six seconds. I assume that LZ Granderson, black man in America, would like to introduce some sort of poll test. Perhaps Haley Barbour could write it.
I don’t know about you, but I am incoherent with rage. As occasionally happens, Combat! blog is grim as fuck today, and I apologize. Fortunately, I have a palate cleanser. Wash the gun taste out of your mouth with this instructional video and live free again:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yVLWTsNf_8&feature=player_embedded
I didn’t find a lot to disagree with in Granderson’s article. I feel like the problems which need to be solved at the federal level are stymied by a politcal body which makes it impossible to implement the solutions. Take the federal deficit. It is a problem where the only solution is to a) decrease services while increasing taxes or b) give up. Solution a is politically untenable, so we can’t solve the problem. A similar line flows from the problems of social security and universal healthcare. Elite thinkers have outlined solutions to these problems, and politicians can’t do a thing with those solutions because it would involve political seppuku.
Obviously an initiative to screen ignorant voters is the type of legislation that isn’t going to get passed. Even it it was, I’m not certain I’d vote for it. But that’s because I don’t think it’s a very robust solution, not because I don’t recognize a problem with American Democracy.
It’s not outlandish to expect that the barrier for citizenship exist for people born to citizens. Certainly the children of doctors are not automatically accredited with degrees. The concept of earning a right to vote, either from a civics test or compulsory military service ala Spaceship Troopers, is interesting, whether you’re at the sixth grade, high school, or hedge fund reading level.
Donald Goddamn Trump.