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August 8, 2012 |
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By Jonathan V. Last |
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COLD OPEN |
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Last week, Americans for Tax Reform caused a big stir when they dug through the tax code and discovered that Americans who win medals at the Olympics get a big bill from the IRS.
It turns out that this isn't the most repugnant tax in the code.
On February 19, 2011, Lance Corporal Andrew Carpenter of the Marine Corps was shot and killed by a sniper in Afghanistan. He was married and his wife was pregnant with a child he never got to meet.
Three years earlier, LCpl. Carpenter had taken out a student loan to pay for college. Upon his death, his family was stuck with that loan.
Not knowing what to do, the Carpenter family reached out to their congressman, Tennessee's Scott DesJarlais, and, happily, he was able to work out a deal where LCpl. Carpenter's loan was forgiven.
Except that the story didn't end there. The IRS decided that this loan forgiveness constituted taxable income. And they came after Carpenter's family with their hand out.
It's unbelievable.
Congressman DesJarlais is trying to set things right. He introduced the Andrew P. Carpenter Act, which would add a new exemption for gross taxable income for those killed while on active duty. The bill has 21 co-sponsors, including two Democrats.
It will be a good thing—a very good thing—if this bill passes. |
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LOOKING BACK |
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"Some parents probably had visions of incontinence on long family car trips when Alexandra Kerry promised Thursday night that, should her father become president, our children will be able to 'control their own bodies.' But if the reference went over the heads of confused Middle Americans, abortion advocates had no trouble recognizing it as a bone thrown their way by the Democratic campaign. Kerry's own challenge to President Bush—'Let's never misuse for political purposes the most precious document in American history, the Constitution of the United States'—will have been received in living rooms across the nation as an insistence that James Madison be given his due. Gay activists, however, surely recognized the allusion to Kerry's opposition to a constitutional amendment to block gay marriage."
—Christopher Caldwell, "Putting Out More Flags," from our August 9, 2004, issue.
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THE READING LIST |
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Atul Gawande on the Cheesecake Factory and the future of the hospital.
The Long Lines of Death: Life on the Western front.
The tragedy of a near-Olympic racewalker. |
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INSTANT CLASSIC |
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"No one has talked about the Democratic Party in a long time. Democrats don't talk about it because they feel they're on the run, and have brand problems. The president doesn't talk about it either, which is remarkable. You'd think he'd want to rally the troops. But he doesn't seem to love his party all that much."
—Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal, August 3, 2012. |
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LOOKING AHEAD |
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We'll have coverage of the presidential race, Iran, and Medicare in upcoming issues of THE WEEKLY STANDARD. |
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THE LAST WORD |
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Before we get started, the good folks at Google changed their Gmail spam algorithm, so some people's newsletters have been getting caught up in the spam folder. Just a reminder that it's probably worth putting this email address, editor@updates.weeklystandard.com, in your "safe" list so that whenever new spam rules get changed, you'll still get the newsletter. (This is probably a good thing to do even if you're not using Gmail, because spam filtering is a dark art and you never know when a trusted correspondent—like me—will be suddenly exiled to the realm of Nigerian scoundrels.)
Now: Two bits of cleanup from last week. First, we talked about the Chick-fil-A fight. One of the sideshows in this minor battle in the culture war was a moment when a gentleman in Arizona went to a Chick-fil-A drive-through, ordered a cup of water, and then recorded himself berating a confused—but ultimately polite and gracious—young woman about the evils of Chick-fil-A and her subsidiary malfeasance in working for the company. The young woman tried to be kind and helpful, though she was clearly unnerved. The fellow with the video camera kept ranting for nearly two minutes, in an increasingly belligerent manner.
In a moment of moral triumph, he then posted the video on YouTube.
The video got a lot of attention because it was shockingly unpleasant—who does that sort of thing? And a day or so later the anonymous gentleman who made the recording was identified. And when his employer got wind of what he'd done, they fired him. You can read about the entire tempest here.
Putting aside all of the moral questions here, what I found particularly revealing was an aspect of the story noted by Rod Dreher:
The man who instigated the one-sided conflict is (or rather, was) a real grown-up and the chief financial officer of a medical device company. The young woman he went after looked to be, maybe, in her early 20s. And she works the drive-through window of a Chick-fil-A.
What we have here is, if you accept the Occupy Wall Street view of the world, a classic confrontation of the 99 percent with the 1 percent. Except that, as you can see, it's the liberal executive "1 percenter" who's angrily trying to belittle and impose his point of view, while the "99 percenter" is poised and professional and just trying to do her job.
There is, I suspect, a larger lesson in there. Somewhere.
Also, before we go, a quick follow-up to last week's discussion about electric cars. In addition to all the other problems with EV's, reader Richard Belzer writes in making this point:
Fans of electric vehicles don’t talk much about the environmental costs of producing the batteries, which are substantial. Hybrid and EV owners seem to think that batteries are renewable resources that grow on trees
As always, environmentalism isn't about the environment—it's about whose ox is being gored.
Have a good rest of the week. As always, you can follow me on Twitter @JVLast and you can always email me with tips, thoughts, etc., at editor@weeklystandard.com.
Best,
Jonathan V. Last
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