In response to the Wall Street Journal’s infamous ‘lucky duckies’ editorial, Jonathan Chait in The New Republic, 23 Dec ’02:
One of the things that has fascinated me about The Wall Street Journal editorial page is its occasional capacity to rise above the routine moral callousness of hack conservative punditry and attain a level of exquisite depravity normally reserved for villains in James Bond movies. To wit, a recent lead editorial titled “THE NON-TAXPAYING CLASS.” A reader unfamiliar with the Journal’s editorial positions might read this headline and assume it refers to ultra-wealthy tax dodgers. But no—the Journal, of course, approves of such behavior. The non-taxpayers it denounces are those who earn too little to pay income taxes: “[A]lmost 13 percent of all workers,” the editorial fumes, “have no tax liability. … Who are these lucky duckies?” In typical Journal fashion, the editorial is premised upon a giant factual inaccuracy—it completely ignores sales and excise taxes, which consume a huge share of the working poor’s income. But what makes the editorial truly exceptional is the reasoning underlying it. The Journal complains that low taxes on the poor are “undermining the political consensus for cutting taxes at all.” For instance, the editorial considers the example of a worker who earns $12,000 per year, and, after noting bitterly that he pays less than 4 percent in income taxes, concludes, “It ain’t peanuts, but not enough to get his or her blood boiling with tax rage.” In other words, the Journal wants to raise taxes on the working poor so that they will have more “tax rage” and thus vote for Republicans. Once in office, of course, those Republicans would proceed to cut taxes for the well- off. (Indeed, according to the Journal’s logic, they couldn’t cut taxes on the poor because that would just lead them to stop voting Republican.) When I try to visualize the editorial meeting that produced this bit of diabolical inspiration, I imagine one of the more rational staffers—maybe Dorothy Rabinowitz—tentatively raising her hand and asking, “Isn’t that idea a bit, you know, immoral?” Then Robert Bartley or Paul Gigot would emit a deep, sinister laugh and press a hidden button, depositing the unfortunate staffer into a tank of piranhas.
