It’s Saturday and once again time for my favorite letters to the editor of the Wall Street Journal this week.
There Is a Cost to Treating the Rich Like Caged ATMs.
It seems amazing that prior to 1966 New Jersey had no sales tax, and prior to 1976, no income tax. As a kid in 1966, I remember the sales tax Gov. Richard Hughes imposed and, just like that, we were off to the fiscal races. In the intervening years, the good times led to increased budgets and state hiring, and the bad times were met with tax increases -- never spending cuts -- and here we are. Let's not even talk about the health and retirement benefits these state employees receive.
I can think of dozens of friends and acquaintances who have changed their residencies to a low-tax state since the last hike in the top New Jersey state income-tax rate in 2004 (to just under 9%). I think it's fair to say that many in this bracket felt unfairly targeted (insulted, really) by Gov. Jim McGreevey's new rate and voted with their feet. I don't know the numbers but I can imagine this has cost the state dearly; our huge budget deficit would indicate that it has. When you consider the broader implications of losing large numbers of the productive people who tend to populate the top tax bracket, soaking the rich is nothing less than political malpractice.
David J. Murphy Rumson, N.J.
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It Used to Be Conservative to Get a Liberal Education
In "The Closing of the American Mind" (1987), Allan Bloom attempted to draw a parallel between Germany circa 1933 and America in 1968. He proposed that in each circumstance, the universities were despised and overthrown, and a political system was compromised by a radical ideology which presumed to offer some higher moral truth than that of bourgeois society. In the first case the attack was on the bankrupt and decadent Wiemar Republic; in the second, it was the ideals of Western civilization and the Enlightenment which, in the 1960s, were trashed by rampant school children wholly ignorant of what those ideals were. In America, as in Germany perhaps, higher education had failed democracy. And in America at least, the adult world had failed it too. We are much the less for it today.
In Mr. Paletta's useful telling of a subsequent anarchic event (there were many), it is clear that a result of "the use of political tactics to produce a politicized university" (insofar as they have been successful) is the passing of the liberal arts. No wonder the cry of today's bereft youth is about "change" and "the future." In their "impoverished souls," as Bloom phrased it, there is neither past nor meaningful present. But no human being, or community of human beings, can begin from nothing like God or history to build anew a homely cottage, let alone so magnificent an edifice as Western civilization. Under the Consulate, Napoleon Bonaparte, declared an end to the French Revolution. This is proof enough for the rational mind that, at a minimum, some "futures" are inherently worse than others.
Blakeslee Barnes New York
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Benefit Incentives Aid Unwed Motherhood
A good article by W. Bradford Wilcox, but he left out one of the most important reasons 20-plus-year-old single women are having babies: the earned income credit ("The Real Pregnancy Crisis," Taste, May 22).
As an Enrolled Agent representing taxpayers before the Internal Revenue Service, I see many more single women having babies and collecting from $2,000 to $4,000 at tax time. Many of these live with their boyfriends instead of marrying them so they can file as single or head of household and collect this delectable refund.
Virginia Bryce Camarillo, Calif.
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Obama's Auto Plan Is an 'ism,' but It's Not Capitalism.
Regarding Scott Sperling's "Obama's Auto Plan Is Capitalism at Work" (op-ed, May 19): I refer Mr. Sperling to the dictionary definition of capitalism: "an economic system in which capitalists play the principal part . . . the operation of the system is controlled by private enterprise."
Almost every paragraph in Mr. Sperling's article describes actions that are the antithesis of capitalism. For example: "the Obama team is focused on fundamentally restructuring"; "the government's offer to GM bondholders"; "all debt holders have now agreed to the government's plan"; "the money government has invested in GM."
There are many more statements that demonstrate President Barack Obama's plan is some form of "ism," but it's certainly not capitalism.
James M. Rodney Birmingham, Mich.
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