I HATE TO PAY UP IN THE MORNING

Taxes again. I can't seem to stop. I see so many goofy observations on them in the public prints that I find myself answering back with no one to hear me. At least if I blog, they can read me. Here goes.

The first commentator to come to my notice was a professor -- again -- from the Department of Economics at Nichols College in Massachusetts. For an economist he's inclined to be quite emotional. At least that's what strikes me about the way he obsesses about growing income disparity as he describes it, and its effect on the economy. It bothers him a lot. Maybe I'm obtuse but it doesn't bother me.

I've resigned myself to the fact that I'm not meant to be a millionaire. This is annoying when you look at some of the people who are. When you look at some of the others, though, it's easier to accept. That's why there's been so little outcry against Gates as compared to what went up about Rockefeller a century ago. His achievement was relatively invisible to the average man, but everyone who has ever used a computer knows that Gates has revolutionized the world and, with others, created the Information Revolution after it had been talked of for years.

There's my explanation for the famous income gulf. The last time we had one of the dimensions pf today's was during the Gold Rush of 1849. Some men got fabulously rich out of it and towered over their competitors. The losers didn't like the winners any better than they do today, but they couldn't get around the fact that it pays to be a pioneer, or at least a successful one. In an age of pioneering these discrepancies spring up and only taper off as new arrivals appear to narrow the gap with the groundbreakers and bring about a gradual equalization and stabilization of income levels. The income gaps diminish and only return when progress again goes into overdrive and lurches ahead without regard to the hurt feelings of the stay-behinds.

Give the professor what he wants and divide every dollar of national income equally and what do you achieve? The poor will feel better and the rich won't of course. But how long will the rich, meaning the earners, put up with it? Remember, when we talk about the poor, we include millions of ne'er-do-wells in jail and out whom no society can equalize with actual producers and providers.

Sharing out wealth equally doesn't of course mean increasing the gross national product. It remains the same, only with the emphases shifted to the needs of the poor rather than to those of the prosperous. That sounds good, but the needs of many of the poor are for drugs, booze, promiscuous sex, pornography, AIDS cures and other such consumer goods. Some rich folks have these tastes too, but not to the same degree or they wouldn't be rich. Equal shares of a static GNP won't work and never have. Unequal shares of a growing GNP bringeth joy to the world.

In the same newspaper where I encountered the above professor I found another, from the University of Bridgeport business school, God help us, who also worries about the income gap, but even more about public resistance to taxes. He writes about a cottage industry of tax denial publishers who encourage individual refusal to pay income taxes. He doesn't suggest they're important, because they're not, but he seems to think they should be suppressed on general principles. You can never be too careful is his mantra. There used to be a lady in Connecticut named Vivian Kellems, who was a tax resister and got a lot of publicity for it, but eventually disappeared from public view. Possibly she frightened the professor in his youth and he has never gotten over it since.

He traces the opposition to taxes to the public's fear of debt, which will require taxation to pay it off. Don't worry, is his message, this debt will never be paid off at face value. The Federal Reserve will inflate the currency enough so that in twenty years the debt will actually be paid off at fifty cents on the dollar, the dollar by then having lost half of its value.

Has anyone told the bondholders about this, I wonder? If they believe this, won't they demand an interest rate that will offset the currency inflation and keep the government's liability at the same level? Assuming, of course, that the Fed actually does intend to inflate. They claim their highest objective is to prevent inflation. When their former chairman Alan Greenspan was asked what was an acceptable rate of inflation he answered "Zero!"

Both professors are of the opinion that unless the government pumps big money into the economy, business will stand still because the banks will simply "freeze" any money they have and hold it in their vaults out of fear of making bad loans. Don't the banks have to pay interest on their deposits? They will have to loosen up and actually make loans to someone or other to pay this interest.

Finally the professors both demonstrate a touching faith in the beauty of taxes and the blessings they bring on the world. There are places in their states not far from their schools where whole communities live on tax money. They should visit them sometime and afterwards ask themselves if there aren't after all some good reasons why so few people share their faith in the business of taking money from working people in the form of taxes and using it to pay for, well, bridges to nowhere?