Los Angeles, Ca.
Traveling Companions: None
Events: California Gubernatorial and Senatorial debates
This is the last day of my road trip. I’ve posted here 29 times and written four print columns along the way, and spoken with hundreds of people expressing every possible political opinion…but somehow Mickey Kaus, tailed closely by Jonah Goldberg, has bestirred himself to comment on only one–my visit to Iron Horse vineyards, owned by the liberal activists, Barry and Audrey Sterling, and run by their daughter, Joy.
Mickey and Jonah, inevitably, distort a striking point that Barry Sterling made: that the current, post-Reagan tax fetishism of the Republican party is foolish. He made the point with a creative overstatement of the case–that he’d survived 70% marginal tax rates; indeed, the high rates caused him to work harder to make more money. I am absolutely certain that Sterling was not advocating a return to 70% rates, as Mickey well knows. He was saying that tax cuts are not the eternal panacea imagined by the Republicans and the supply-side notion that if you lower rates revenues will increase is a gross fallacy (as the past 30 years, including the Clinton tax increases, have proven). Mickey has done some valuable work in the past, and he serves as a useful curmudgeon on more than a few issues, but he sure can be a feckless, puerile jerk at times.
The Sterling visit unique in my travels; most of my interviews took place in coffee shops, political meetings and modest middle class neighborhoods–the sort of places Kaus and Goldberg, and far too many of my other columniating colleagues, rarely frequent. I’ve faithfully reported lots of views along the way and, in most cases, tried not to cast judgment on the people telling their stories. Readers have gotten exercised about some and were moved by others. I’ll attempt to make some larger sense of what I’ve seen next week in the print magazine. After I get some sleep.
This post is part of my Election Road Trip 2010 project. To track my location across the country, and read all my road trip posts, click here.