Amerikai Magyar Szó, 1989. július-december (43. évfolyam, 27-48. szám)
1989-10-26 / 40. szám
Thursday, Oct. 26. 1989. AMERIKAI MAGYAR SZO 11. Capital Gains Tax Cut: A Party For The Rich By JESSE JACKSON Jesse Jackson, presidential candidate in 1984 and 1988, is president of the National Rainbow Coalition. This is one of his columns that appears weekly in the New York Newsday. Do you ever get the feeling that you are watching a re-run of an old "B" movie? That's the way I feel watching President Bush, his fellow Republicans and renegade Democrats trying to bring back the "trickle- down" theory with a capital gains tax-cut. I always thought trickle-down was fine theory for dogs and fire hydrants, but I never much liked it as a strategy for lifting the lot of working Americans. Over the last decade, while the income and profits of the wealthy soared, the richest one percent of Americans received a 25 percent cut in the taxes they paid. The idea behind President Reagan's "supply-side" economics was to "stimulate investment." The reality was that the super rich did invest - in sports cars, diamond rings and other luxury items that did nothing to strenghten the economy or benefit working people. In January, the Bush administration simply took over where the Reagan administration left off. The president's first major act was to veto an increase in the minimum wage. He said that it would hurt the economy to give an extra $ 1.20 an hour to the people who mop floors in office buildings and empty bedpans in hospitals. He evidently felt that the poor had too much money and couldn't be trusted with more, while the rich did not have enough and needed some more of everyone else's. The Bush administration in its second major move, promptly came up with a multibillion dollar parachute, paid for by the American taxpayer, for the savings and loan industry to bail out with. Now Bush wants to use the tax system to throw another lavish party for the rich at the expense of America's working people. He proposes excluding from taxation 30 percent of the profit from the sale of an asset in order to "encourage investment." Congress' Joint Committee on Taxation has determined that 80 percent of all capital gains benefits go to the richest 5 percent, and more than 60 percent of the benefits would go to the tiny percentage of Americans earning more than $ 200.000 a year. Their average tax savings under the Bush plan would be a staggering $ 30.820 or about what most working American families live on. Most taxpayers have no capital gains at all. (Except for what they receive from the sale of their own homes.) For the four out of five American families that earn less than $ 50.000 a year, the average tax savings would be $ 20. This plan does nothing for postal workers or teachers or bus drivers. The most surprising thing about the latest Republican welfare-for-the-wealthy tax scheme is that a number of Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committtee collaborated on it. The wayward Democrats are: Ed Jenkins, from Georgia, Ronnie Flippo from Alabama, Beryl Anthony from Arkansas, Michael Andrews from Texas and Andy Jacobs from Indiana. Their votes are contrary to the interests of the poverty- stricken farmers and workers in their own districts. It is time for the real Democratic Party, and Republicans who care, to take a strong stand against Robin-Hood-in-reverse economics. It is time to push for an economic program that invests in America's people -instead of "trickling down" on them. We need a "first house" plan for working Americans before we have a "beach house" plan for the rich. There should be a straightforward up or down vote on the floor of the House on this welfare-for-the-wealthy plan. The congressional representatives who believe in invest-in-America economics should be separated from those who believe in born-again, trickle-down "voodoo" economics - to borrow the 1980 phrase of that well-kwnown social reformer, George Bush. America is watching. ■ ART MONUMENTS^ AND CHURCH POLICY Csaroda: Calvinist Church Sopron. Synagogue The Calvinist Church is Szabolcs, in Eastern Hungary can be traced back to the Magyar Conquest (896). The present church which is single-spaced with a sanctuary on a semi-circular base, was originally built according to architectural findings - as a three-aisled church; its origin can be traced back to the 11 th century. The Calvinist church at Csaroda is in the area beyond the river Tisza, and one of the purest "Hungarian examples" of late Romanesque architecture; its sanctuary was built in the 13th century on a square base. The body of the tower rises from the nave and from the roof. The tower ends in a peak, towering over the wooden gallery. The church has restored paintings from the 13th-14th century, The church at Tornaszentandrás sits amid the picturesque ( landscape of the North Hungarian Hernkd Valley; it dates VISIT TO m BOß Editor's Note: One of our readers, Mitch Berkowitz recently completed a trip to East-Germany (GDR). He was there during the emigration wave to West Germany and was kind enough to send us an account of what he saw. Due to limited space, we had to condense his report. An estimated 15 to 20 thousand GDR citizens recently chose to leave family, home and country in search of a different kind of life in the FRG. Prior to this wave of emigration, another 40 to 50 thousand left the GDR legally this year. Fully half of them are now unemployed in the FRG, and GDR authorities claim to have 20 thousand applications for permission to return. I traveled in the GDR at the height of this outward migration, during the mid- September days when the Hungarian-Austrian border was opened for the GDR emigrants. I traveled with nine other Americans visiting Berlin, Potsdam, Karl Marx Stadt and Dresden. We have a more than usual interest in appraising life in the country because of the dramatic exodus that was taking place. We saw factories and housing complexes where we spoke with workers, union leaders, managers and tenant committees. People do not get rich in the GDR. Neither do they get unemployed, or homeless, or uneducated, or destitute because of illness or old age. Most of the emigrants speak, in the western press, of a flight to freedom. Perhaps a young GDR physician was more candid when he told a N.Y. Times reporter, "I saw my last patient at 4 PM yesterday. I left all- sweetheart, parents, patients. You only live once. I have a Traband. I want a Mercedes." After my GDR tour I went to the FRG to visit friends in Munich. There, a prosperous businessman "corrected" me when I spoke of having visited Karl Marx Stadt. "Kilmnits", he said. (This was the pre-war name of Karl Marx Stadt.) "Perhaps it is Kilmnits to you," I replied, "but it is K-M-S to the people who live there." In ten years it will be Kilmnits again, he snapped. This is a reflection of the ominous news that a clearly Nazi-style political party recently scored big gains in a West Berlin election. I am hoping to see the GDR again. I hope it can overcome boycott, embargo, brain- drain and subversion. I hope it can solve its problems and remain what I saw, a place of quiet, litter-and crimefree streets, a society reaching for social goals. from about 1200 as a late example Öf Ca- rolingian architecture. In its twin sanctuaries and naves, the Romanesque windows were cleared and the frescoes restored. The remains of the synagogue in Sopron, from the beginning of the 14th century, are also highly valuable; they were discovered in 1967 at the back of two apartment houses. This is one of the known European synagogues whose earliest complete arrangement has been found.
