Ivanka: The Moral Leader We've Been Waiting For

Attention please: First Daughter Ivanka Trump has just made an important pronouncement.

By the way, does Tiffany get to be a first daughter too, even though she's farther down the line of success, I mean succession, and needs more plastic surgery to make standard? No matter. We'll go ahead and call Ivanka the first daughter, although there's probably no way of knowing at this point how many there really are, either fleshed or flushed.

Anyway, back to Ivanka's important pronouncement. She really isn't getting enough credit for it. She is now in a high enough position she can look right down into the hearts of Americans, most of them anyway, and she likes what she sees. She says:

"I don't think most Americans, in their heart, want to be given something. People want to work for what they get. So, I think that this idea of a guaranteed minimum is not something most people want."

And she is absolutely right. Most people not only want to work, they also want to be paid for it, and not at a wage that has been driven down over the years by employers' willingness to exploit a vulnerable immigrant slave class for their personal profit. I'd go so far as to say most people who put in at least a forty-hour work week would like to be able to rent some kind of shelter and feed themselves, and it would be super awesome if they didn't have to worry what would happen if they got sick, too. You know, they'd like to be able to live modestly with some security, like they do in those backwards countries like Sweden and Denmark.

And all that is totally possible as long as we listen to our First Daughter, The One That Counts. Because if it is true that most Americans want to work for what they get, things are about to change for the better around here. This means Americans like little Ivanka and her peers--and who knows them better?--must be totally on board with a maximum wage. You make a million a year, five million, fifty million--we should be able to decide on a reasonable limit somewhere--that really ought to do it for you, assuming you want to work for what you get.

We could even cross our fingers and pretend everyone in that range has worked hard to make the world a better place. Ha ha! But there's got to be a certain amount above which we can all agree that, no matter who you are, you cannot possibly have earned it. Then we scoop up your soul-corrupting excess, everyone else gets a decent minimum and health care and a modicum of support and security, and you still get to be rich as all fuck. Nothing but winners here.

And, Skippy? You might make a case that you've earned all your money, up to a point, but once you've started just piling it up instead of paying your workers decent wages or safeguarding the environment, it's time for the grownups to take over. We don't let the entitled brats run the show. They'll get spoiled, and we want them to be civilized members of society.

It doesn't even have to be tied to merit. A generous society can even reward those who haven't worked a day in their lives, if we want to. It would be nuts not to confiscate most of the utterly unwarranted millions they got from dear old dead dad, but we can let them have a real nice start without penalty, a bit of a boost, and after that it's all up to them.

There is such a thing as a "self-made man," but of course Ivanka's daddy isn't it. If you were going to make a man, would you make one like that? Of course you wouldn't. But we can let folks like him get that nice good running start before we start relieving them of their unearned excess. What we can't do is abolish the estate tax altogether. That would be morally corrupting, and sweet Ivanka wouldn't hear of it.

Because we're Americans. We all want to work for what we get.

Ecclesiastes 5:10

An editor in our local rag put in a nice Thanksgiving piece saying how grateful she is to rich people for paying all our taxes for us. Most of us don't contribute much at all, says she, and it is the very wealthy who are supplying the bulk of our revenue. (Thank you, rich people, and please accept our outsized contribution of sacrificial humans for the war machine you make money on.)

It never occurs to her to think there's anything wrong with the fact that a slim sliver of the population has so goddamn much money that they can pretty much fund the government they're trying to shrink, or the interest on the swelling national debt, and yet they're still rich. But there is something wrong here. It's unconscionable. It's immoral. You can take the Pope's word on that, or Jesus's, even though only one of them is a Christian.

There are a few ways to get filthy rich, but they don't track real well with merit. Some of the folks who got hold of a good idea and had decent entrepreneurial skills managed to accumulate a lot of money, and they are busy trying to give it away as fast as they can, which is what any mentally healthy person with too much money would do. Others are just buying warehouses to stash their money in and giving away only so much as it takes to buy off Congress and get them even more money. These people don't need more money. They need therapy.

Most of the truly wealthy have stolen it. You don't need a gun. We're all stealing. When we consume palm oil, which is in everything, we steal land and livelihood from indigenous peoples. We steal our children's future by dumping carbon from deforestation into our atmosphere. We're able to buy stuff cheap because our slave class is in another country. We murder people in the Congo to acquire the minerals for our cell phones. Everything has a cost, even if we prefer to ignore it.

The rich people's money is not theirs. It's stolen too. We used to have living-wage jobs in this country. We used to have pensions. We were doing all right. Then came the campaign to eviscerate the labor unions. Wages stagnated or tumbled and the increased profits that resulted went to the investor class. Our plodding but reliable pensions gave way to the "ownership society." We could do so much better on our own if we just hand over our reduced wages to the financial sector. Only we didn't do better. We gambled it on a game we didn't understand and someone else got the big pot. And it's gone. It's stolen. It trickled straight uphill and we won't see it again. And if anyone truly believed this concentrated wealth was earned or deserved, there would be no talk of repealing the estate tax.

Did you hear Senator Chuck Grassley (age 134, plus or minus fifty years) the other day? He was asked why we should reward the already-wealthy by repealing the estate tax. Why, says he, that's to show a little appreciation to the people who sweated and saved their pennies and invested and contributed to society. Senator Grassley says the rest of us working stiffs spent our money on booze and women and movies.

Booze, and women, and movies.

Oh, Senator Grassley, I do declare! Thank you for standing up for all us little ladies at home in our calico frocks who would be in the catbird seat right now if our worthless husbands wasn't squandering our butter money on booze and broads. Please go right after our Medicare next so the sons of bitches will realize whut they done and mend their ways! But Senator, suh? We do love us some movin' pitchers and a little sarsaparilla now and then. Is that so bad?

Seriously, little senator dude? If you believe a wealthy man--let's assume it's a man, since you do--should be rewarded for his thrift and foresight and hard work, over and above the reward of his own wealth, whyever would you want to dump a ton of money on his kids' heads? Let them scrimp and save, if that's what you truly admire. Let us all start out equal. Heh heh. Just kidding. We ain't at the same starting line. We ain't even in the same race.