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Sunday February 25, 2001
"Income taxation has been shifting so that a relatively small number of people at the very top pay for much of goverment, while middle-class benefits, like old-age pensions, health care, and public schooling, have become more generous. Soon, unless something is done, most people will have no reason not to keep voting for more government, because they won't be paying for it." Jim DeMint , The New Yorker, February 19, 2001, cited by Nicholas Lemann Or, as I've been saying, when you cite how many dollars someone will save under Bush's plan and the figure for the top level shown is enough to buy a Lexus...well that probably means that, without a tax cut, that theoretical taxpayer is signing over enough to the government every year for thirteen or fourteen Lexuses. And wait until the guy dies. The government will get a bunch more Lexuses.
thanks to ebay traders for images of old postcards
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rainy Sunday We meet a young New Yorker friend for breakfast in the hotel. She is working for an Internet company. Doing training media. She is young and full of ideas. She likes New York and needs to live there 'because I never learned to drive' but she decries the 'KMarting' of the city and says there are CVS pharmacies and Starbucks on every corner up the west side. We decide to confine ourselves to the Metropolitan Museum for our day time entertainment. It is raining on the snow. The museum is pleasant. We spend a lot of time in the Nineteenth and Twentieth century paintings and the American collection. We have a salad at the restaurant. It's so strange to go to a place where there are rooms full of Van Goghs, Renoirs, Picassos, Monets. Rooms full of antiquities. Any one would make a museum great in smaller towns. You always have to just say, "Wow." A few hours reading and e-mailing in the hotel and we head down to Les Halles, a casual French bistro. FFP has a duck magret and I have delicious lamb sausage, salad, and pommes frites. We drink a nice Bordeaux. FFP has discovered a cabaret place up the street, a place called Arci's. We pay the cover and order some drinks. It's a small room. The singer, Stephen Lutvack, does all his own material. He's a gay man and some of it is autobiographical but it's all full of whimsy and old time show tune value. He has great skills with piano, vocals and audience. It is great having reservations for stuff. But it's also fun to find that unexpected fun thing. Where there just happens to be a table for two left.
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