At her trial for tax evasion in 1989, billionaire hotel queen Leona Helmsley's attitude about paying taxes was famously quoted by a housekeeper. "We don't pay taxes," Helmsley said. "Only the little people pay taxes."
By that, she meant that she didn't play by the same rules as the rest of us non-tycoons.
Just as the financial meltdown has exposed alleged fraudsters like Bernie Madoff and Robert Allen Stanford, so too has it rocked many Americans' sense of what it means to play by the rules. It didn't help that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and three other Obama nominees failed to pay all their federal income taxes.
Most Americans still play by the rules. They pay their mortgage. They didn't take on a house they knew they couldn't afford, just because the bank was willing to lend them the money. Even with free and easy credit, they didn't run up credit-card debt to catastrophic proportions. They socked some cash in the stock market and they held it as the market plunged because that's what the experts told them to do.
And now, as the bailouts escalate and the stock market staggers, some of them feel like chumps. They didn't do any of those risky things that torpedoed the economy, but they're still on the hook to pay for the rescue. They've lost, or could still lose, their jobs. Their retirement accounts are swooning.
Columnist Susan Estrich recently wrote that "the critical divide" in America isn't between Democrats and Republicans, but "between those who are looking for or have received a government bailout and those who haven't. And that divide is defined, at least in part, by those who played by the rules and those who didn't. . . ."
Yeah, I pretty much think that's the difference between conservatives and liberals. Four tax cheatin' Obamunists proves it.
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