P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
Bill Clinton is not a hypocrite. If a man believes that it is just and moral to redistribute wealth, there is nothing hypocritical in his attempts to redistribute some of that wealth to himself.
O'Rourke, P. J. Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut. Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995.
It became a slogan and rallying cry for Long and his followers.
An income tax had been instituted during the Civil War but had lapsed. Existing taxes were all excise or head taxes—very regressive. Later there was a political movement to bring back the income tax with the intention of taxing all income equally. There was a titanic struggle which culminated in a Constitutional Amendment allowing the income tax. None of the original politicians, for or against, the income tax could never imagine an income tax that would charge lower rates for investment income. That was the entire purpose of the income tax at the beginning—to tax investment (unearned) income. The “capital gains tax” was the creative way of the rich getting back some of what they thought the lost when the income tax was instituted.
In modern America, there are two political views of this notion. The one held by a small majority of the population is Trenchard’s quotation taken literally. Their view is that there if the is no way to maintain liberty if there is too wide a gap between the rich and the rest of the population. The second variant, held by many conservatives limits the equality to equality of opportunity. They are loathe to take any position that says that any gap between the rich and the remainder of the citizens might be too large. They would particularly disagree with the first sentence of another Trenchard quotation, {627024}.
Justifying his support of the Hyde Amendment prohibiting Federal funds to be used to perform abortions. Carter was normally a staunch defender of equal opportunity for the poor, but the Hyde Amendment de facto prohibited poor women from exercising their rights to have abortions while middle class and wealthy women could exercise that right.. The hypocrisy was difficult for him to explain.
Patrick Jake O'Rourke is an American political satirist and journalist. O'Rourke is the H. L. Mencken Research Fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute and is a regular correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, The American Spectator, and The Weekly Standard, and frequent panelist on National Public Radio's game show Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! Since 2011, he has been a columnist at The Daily Beast.
