The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Our favorite capitalist, Elon the Musk, just asked for and got a trillion dollar bonus package by the profit-happy stockholders of Tesla who voted over 75% to accede to the boy wonder’s demands. Atlas didn’t just shrug, Atlas jumped up and down like a pom-pom powered cheerleader on meth. At the same moment the government shutdown has left 41.7 million of us struggling to buy food, what with the SNAP food stamp program on indefinite hold. Judges have ordered it resumed but needless to say the Administration has appealed those decisions. Let them eat cake, some might say, but good luck affording that.

If you were to take that trillion dollars and distribute it to the 41.7 million Americans experiencing food shortages, each one of them would get 24, 500 dollars. That, needless to say, is a helluva lot of cake. Might even make bakers rich in these tough times.

I’m not against capitalism. Geez, I am a capitalist. Got my own bizness, believe it or not, pay B&O taxes, quarterlies, even hire help when needed. Call me a job creator, maybe not in the Big Leagues, but definitely an entrepreneur. The more I make, the more taxes I pay. If that were true for all of us job creators, we might have a more equitable distribution of wealth, but the tax laws are designed to let the rich, especially the really rich, slip the noose. Deferments, deductions, dodges — the intricacies of the IRS codes, written by the rich for the rich, definitely skew toward the favored elite. Their mantra is that they pay more than the poor so why pick on us?

Which, if you apply that, makes sense that they’re not bothered by shutting down the SNAP program. Blame the Democrats, they say. And the Democrats, who refuse to let Obamacare subsidies expire, another kick in the teeth of the cake eaters, claim the money they want to save is really going for tax cuts for the rich.

I don’t pretend to have the solution for our ever accumulating national debt, but I know this: the next elections will be about income inequality. The posters will be Elon in a gold Tesla with a ragamuffin kid nearby with outstretched hands. Even in America’s present Gilded Age, that disparity is more than a little unsettling. A trillion dollars for one man, not many of us think he’s worth too much more than a billion or two.