LA Times business reporter Michael Hiltzik frothed at the mouth again as he wrapped up his Thursday business column, which was nominally about the California ballot initiative to prevent public employee union dues from being used for political purposes without annual affirmation by each individual union member:

“… Schwarzenegger’s studied indifference to the public employee initiative (he hasn’t taken a formal position) is just another fraud.

The reality is that all the talk by the initiative’s sponsors about empowering the worker is fatuous bunk; they’re really out to cripple one of the few tools the worker has to be heard by the powers that be — collective political action.

But they know and care nothing about the wants and needs of workers …”

If we had our way we’d ban all public employee union campaign donations, since they are straight payola to the governors, legislators, mayors and councilpeople who will negotiate the next union contract. This initiative sounds moderate by comparison.

But we’re most interested in the phrasing of the neo-marxist content, and the off-the-deep-end use of “fraud” and “fatuous bunk.” Also note the Schwarzenegger slam. There’s more to come!

In his 4/7/2005 column, “The Rich Are Behind Trust Fund Myth” — the title alone tells you what’s coming — we hear of the President “smirking inanely” before we get to a bizarre class warfare argument on Social Security, and then the grand finale anti-Arnold invective in a piece about the federal social security problem:

“All the talk that the country won’t be able to redeem the bonds in the 2020s, and therefore that Social Security benefits must be cut or privatized, really boils down to a refusal by the rich to repay decades of loans from the middle and lower classes.

… because the payroll tax is paid mostly by the middle class and poor, and the income tax disproportionately by the rich, the result has been a redistribution of wealth from the bottom up. Roughly three-quarters of all workers pay more in Social Security tax than income tax; because all wages over $90,000 are exempt from the payroll tax, it’s the wealthy who get the break.

On the other hand, if income taxes are raised to pay off the trust fund bonds after 2020, it’s the wealthy who will be hit hardest. They don’t want to pay, which is why their mouthpieces in the administration are whining that the trust fund is a myth and that the country can’t afford to redeem the bonds.

The pretense that the interests of wealthy taxpayers coincide with those of the entire community has become alarmingly popular among Republican officeholders. It’s the basis of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s argument that the state can’t afford to raise income taxes, but somehow can afford to welsh on his debt to the public school system (which mostly serves the non-wealthy). There are encouraging signs that Californians have begun to get wise to the governor’s scam; one can only hope that the rest of the country soon gets wise to the president’s.”

It’s hard to know where to start with his thesis. Reversing Hiltzik’s logic, the wealthier have been loaning money to the poor for years — they have higher tax burdens, after all. The Congressional Budget Office projected in August 2004 that the top 20% of households pay 63.5% of all federal tax liabilities, including SS/Medicare, and the top 40% pay 83%. The bottom 40% pay 6.3%. So if even if wealth were being redistributed up, as Hiltzik contends, it’s rounding error.

Tortured logic aside, our problem is the tone of the piece. Hiltzik is a columnist for one of the country’s most prominent newspapers. But the pejorative — inanely smirking president, whining mouthpieces, governor’s scam — is straight out of high school. If Hiltzik can’t make his argument rationally, he should write for the Daily Kos instead.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 5th, 2005 at 11:09 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under LA Times' Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, California Schemin', Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.