Tax Americana - Wolfowitz, Act IV

Stimulated by Billmon’s playing with scenario building in the eventuality of Paul Wolfowitz’s confirmation as President of the World Bank, and reinforced by Michael Lind’s article in Salon.com (Mr. Magoo goes to the World Bank) about Wolfowitz’s perfect incompetence over the decades:

No summary of Wolfowitz’s catastrophically successful career would be complete without acknowledgment that he was one of the major American sponsors of the disgraced Ahmed Chalabi, whom Paul Bremer’s administration in Baghdad accused of involvement in Iranian espionage. Last but not least, following Wolfowitz’s diplomatic mission to Turkey to obtain support for the forthcoming U.S. invasion of Iraq, Turkey decided to have nothing to do with the war.

We live in a country in which privates are punished for the crimes of generals, so it is only natural that Wolfowitz should be rewarded for the blunders, errors and miscalculations that have cost the American and Iraqi people so much by promotion to the World Bank. That’s the way it is with Mr. Magoo. Whenever he steps blindly out of a building he has accidentally set on fire, a truck is always conveniently passing by.

I found myself wondering whether Wolfowitz will suggest that the best way to spread freedom and democracy will be for the World Bank to become the world’s revenue service, levying and collecting taxes to be put to the use of building and sustaining freedom-generating and democratic institutions and processes the world over …

… a taxation doctrine similar to Pax Americana, wherein the wealthy get permanent tax cuts, trickle-down economics becomes the de facto form of global economic stimulation, and daily subsistence wages become the de facto minimum wage *law*.