Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
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Matt,
As a known dog lover, you have to settle a debate for me: Our pup sits in the window of our high rise and growls randomly at suspicious looking people walking around the train station across the street. My wife thinks he is a smart dog and knows good people from bad. I am afraid he is racist. Is he?
Please help.
Alex R.
Arlington, VA
Without having met your dog, it’s hard to say definitively. If I were to come by your house, a la Cesar the Dog Whisperer, I’d run him through a battery of racism diagnostic tests, employing visual cues that double as easily identifiable racist stereotypes, just to see how he reacts.
For instance, to determine if he hates African-American men, I might wear a Bluetooth headset, and never remove it, even when I’m not expecting a call. If your dog growls, consider him racist. Would your dog seem agitated if I walked around with bad teeth, wearing a shiny track suit, talking about how great my country used to be 100 years before I was born? It’s a sure sign of his creeping anti-British racism. Would he bare his fangs if I behaved brusquely, drank lots of doppelbock, and lectured all your neighbors on the importance of leaving their doors open so that absolutely anyone could enter their apartments? Then you likely have a German-hating dog on your hands.
I can hear the pedants saying, “You’re combining apples and oranges, confusing race with ethnicity. Brits and Germans are both white.” So you say. I don’t see color, even if I consider Germans more café au lait due to the permanent tans they sport from their 36 weeks a year of mandatory paid vacation. But seeing color is racist. Which makes the less enlightened among us hate people because of their outsides. More discriminating discriminators hate people because of their insides.
I do notice, however, that when discussing your dog, you assume that “suspicious looking people” are synonymous with “people of a different race.” So maybe your dog’s racism isn’t inherent. Perhaps it’s a learned behavior—from his master. (“Master” itself being a word with a long racist pedigree.)
While all communications here are generally protected by advice-columnist/truth-seeker privilege, protecting a racist is tantamount to covering for pedophiles or public-restroom misgenderers. So I’ve no choice but to hand your email over to the League of Social Justice Warriors. Expect a harsh, swift punishment, up to and including having to listen to the complete archive of The New Republic‘s “Intersection” podcast. An admittedly stiff price to pay. But a toll that thinking, feeling people must collect from unrepentant racists like you and your dog.
Dear Matt,
I like buying things. Frivolous, expensive things that I don’t have enough money for as one of those disappearing middle-class workers. So for future planning purposes, how much more money should I expect to take home from President Trump’s newly announced tax plan?
Marjorie
Salisbury, MD
Wait, was that a plan? It felt more like a few random suggestions scribbled on a cocktail napkin. Or perhaps the fake phone number offered with the disingenuous invitation to “call me later.”
I have admittedly disparaged Donald Trump in this space now and then, even while loathing myself for joining the vulgar herd that is 99 percent of the rest of the press corps. Though Trump makes it so easy and fun, that it’s something like journalistic malpractice not to succumb to the impulse on occasion.
However, unlike certain racist dogs I could mention, I have no hate in my heart. I actually have plenty in common with our president: our direct way of speaking, our love of supermodels, our snap-on hairpieces. Chief among those similarities—or so I thought—was that we both detest the IRS, thinking it a necessary evil, and perhaps even an unnecessary one. Not to question their goodwill, but it is the one government agency capable of taking the only two certainties in life—death and taxes—and combining then into one handy estate tax, dinging us after we’ve already suffered the indignity of dying. Which feels a bit like double jeopardy. (And which Trump, to his credit, promises to eliminate.)
But Trump’s plan, as of yet, has nearly no meat on its bones. We do know a few things (very few), some good, some not so good. On the plus side, this one-page “plan” will “grow the economy and create millions of jobs,” whatever that means. It will collapse seven tax brackets to three tax brackets—good news if you’re going down a tax bracket, bad news if you’re going up a tax bracket. It will allegedly lower the business tax rate to 15 percent. This might encourage businesses to offshore your jobs at a slower rate than technological advancement is eliminating them. (In the near future, an algorithm might be writing these Cassandra screeds instead of me, in which case we will change the name of this column to “Ask Siri.”)
But on the negative side, Trump’s plan has about as many specifics as my plan to cure cancer. It could add up to $7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. It offers no clue as to what income levels apply to the new improved tax rates. But the language that makes my blood run cold is the inference that it will eliminate all tax deductions besides home mortgage interest and charitable giving. Which means ditching many of my tried-and-true’s, such as the property tax deduction and writing off state income taxes on my federal form.
This is bad. I’m no tax expert, which is precisely why I employ one—my accountant. It works like this: I pay him a couple hundred dollars a year. He gives official sanction to all my lawful deductions, which are myriad. I don’t go crazy, or anything, unlike the writer friend I had who deducted all of his wife’s clothing, rationalizing that if she paraded around the house naked while he was on deadline, it would be impossible for him to work.
And so, my accountant and I have a sacred trust. While my broad tax outlines change little year to year, I annually claim the many deductions that lower my tab, while he judges their merit and then does complicated math stuff, as we non-math people say. I create wealth for him by paying him to do this. He creates wealth for me by reducing my tax burden, sometimes to as low a rate as 10 percent, God bless him.
Flat-taxers and other simplistic tax simplifiers always sing the glories of de-complicating the tax code. But if an uncomplicated tax code makes me pay more taxes, what’s the point? Who cares if I fire my accountant, as I can now decipher my own tax forms, if that means that I pay 30 percent more in taxes than the few hundred dollars I was once paying him? Better to be confused and hold on to more of your money, than to gain perfect clarity while having less.
For some people, admittedly, this might work out just fine. (Surprise, surprise, but plenty of analysts are already saying it will benefit the one-percenters.) While I’m still left asking the most important question, the question I always ask when a new policy comes down the pike: How does it affect me? If I end up paying more taxes under a Republican administration than I did under our allegedly socialist friend, Barack H. Obama, well, I’m going to be even less inclined to vote for Donald Trump than I was the first time around. And I suspect I’ll have a lot more Republican company.
Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
