Teresa Heinz

Teresa Heinz-Kerry (whose first name is pronounced te-RAY-za, of which James Taranto has a good memory aid: she wants te-RAY-za your taxes) is a great source for satire and irony. She said that she didn’t know if Laura Bush ever had a real job. That’s really an indirect way of saying that (unless THK is so ignorant) she didn’t think being a schoolteacher is a real job. Well, I for one don’t know if THK ever had a real job. Did she ever pay any payroll taxes?

Speaking of which, her recently disclosed tax return (two pages for upwards of $5M!) shows that she pays an effective rate much lower than I do, when I make much much less than she does! Of course, she probably derives much of her income from tax-favored investments such as municipal bonds and dividends. I have no qualms about that; double-taxing dividends is bad economics, and I am in favor of abolishing that double taxation rather than the stupid 15% with endless qualifications. But it shows that the really rich people are not affected much by tax policy, so they don’t mind raising other people’s taxes and thereby have even more control of other people’s lives. Such blatant hypocrisy does’t seem to bother the leftist Demos who engage in the lowest kind of demogoguery all the time (hey, they’re supposed to be the party of the common man!). And it is the working people (we who have real jobs) who are being coerced into paying into bankrupt systems such as Social (In)security and Medicare.