Whose Windfall?
Meyer, Carlin
Every couple of years friends of friends from Denmark come to visit. When they leave I always ask them, "What impressed you the most about New York City?" Always, I hear the same reply. Not...
...And I wish I could stop each one of us as we spend those "windfall" dollars on the new Easter hat, or the night on the town, or the video cassette we'll watch twice, or the trip to the Bahamas—stop each one of us and ask if we'd be willing to give it back if it meant fewer homeless in the subways and bus stations, fewer dropouts and drug addicts, fewer hungry and desperate...
...They've tried to convince me that though we're capable at this moment of producing vastly more food to feed our thousands of hungry (and, indeed, hunger activists tell me that we already produce enough), it is nonetheless necessary to pay farmers not to plant and to let cheese and butter and grain rot in storage bins...
...Last week I had lunch with a friend who told me about his best law school buddy, now a senior partner in a major Wall Street law firm...
...they always ask me...
...And then I listen sadly as the politicians of our 424 • DISSENT great city and state race each other to the microphones to announce with great fanfare that they will be the first to return to the individual taxpayer the "windfall" gain to government tax coffers that has resulted from slight adjustments in the federal tax laws (adjustments that lower the basic income tax rate for the $800,000-a-year partner...
...My Danish friends are teachers, or carpenters, or government employees...
...What has impressed them about New York City is the appalling disparity of wealth...
...His expense account is $100,000, or about $2,000 a week...
...Sometimes I wonder how I can...
...They've tried to convince me that even though there is much work to be done to enable our city to survive, and even though there are thousands of unemployed ready, willing, and eager to do it, it somehow isn't possible to put work and worker together...
...Not the Statue of Liberty, the World Trade Center, or Wall Street...
...They tell me that the issues require an understanding of microeconomics and macroeconomics and inflation and deflation and conflagration...
...q FALL • 1987 • 425...
...I know that virtually every one of us would gladly give it up...
...I know what every one of us would say and do, if someone stood next to us as we received that "windfall" refund (or set out to spend it) and asked for the return of that small gift to our city and its people...
...they pay 50 percent of those small salaries in income tax so that all Danes can have medical care, food, and basic necessities...
...I have a sneaking suspicion that it really isn't about numbers or graphs or statistics...
...But no matter how they try to explain it, I just can't seem to get it...
...I'd like to put a referendum on the ballot...
...About political and personal and yes, even moral choices...
...Of a 50 percent inheritance tax that might pay for free college tuition, or adequate staffing, equipment, and buildings for our elementary and high schools...
...They don't have expense accounts...
...They earn small salaries ($15,000 to $25,000 — they can never afford hotels when they come to the United States...
...I try to imagine what I and hundreds of thousands of other average New Yorkers will buy with the $50, or $500 or even $1,000 that we will gain...
...I look around me at the decaying city structures and at the thousands of unemployed, young and old, and imagine having the funds to hire those unemployed to accomplish all of the public works so desperately needed just to hold our crumbling infrastructure together, let alone to make the city a glorious place to live in (planting flowers and trees, painting murals, supporting free theater and concerts all year round...
...They've drawn graphs and pictures and charts...
...But whenever I tell this dream, this vision, to the ones in the know—the politicians and the academics and the planners and the pundits—they tell me that it's not that simple...
...Not the architecture or the food or the jazz or the theater...
...Some of them have even tried to show me why it would be economically counterproductive for the wealthiest nation in the world to redistribute its wealth so that children are not born malnourished and do not grow up to turn to suicide and drugs...
...How can you stand to live in such a place...
...Maybe it's even about choosing which side you are on...
...I have the feeling somehow that it's about choices...
...I wish for, I dream of, a 50 percent income tax that might pay for the housing for the homeless that no one can seem to build, or the food for the hungry that we pay midwestern farmers not to grow...
...I think of the Wall Street partner and of my Danish friends whenever I pass a homeless person, a streetwalker, a beggar, a junkie...
...His buddy's "draw" (annual salary) is $800,000...
Vol. 34 • September 1987 • No. 4
