Remember Arianna Stassinopoulos? No reason why you should on that side of the Atlantic unless you're writing a monograph on ex-girlfriends of Bernard Levin, writes Mark Steyn.
Arianna was the veteran London Times man's glamorous Greek eye-candy back in the 1970s, but quit Britain, headed to New York, married a wealthy Republican and took his name (Huffington), became a Newt Gingrich acolyte, and then, just as her husband came out as a gay man, Arianna, the hardcore Newtist, switched her own orientation to "compassionate progressive".
Arianna Huffington is currently running for governor of California. Hey, who isn't? But Arianna has a very distinctive platform. She thinks President Bush, not Governor Davis, is really to blame for the state's problems; that we need more government programmes and fewer gas-guzzling SUVs; that we needed to end corporate welfare and close the loopholes than enable the wealthiest to avoid paying any taxes.
So I was interested to learn from Thursday's Los Angeles Times that Arianna doesn't pay any state or federal income tax.
She's got a gazillion-dollar-a- month divorce settlement from the gay Republican and an 8,000- square-foot $7 million home in swanky Brentwood where she throws lavish celebrity parties. But she pays no income tax because in recent years she's reported some $2.7 million in losses on her business.
Wow. Thank God I'm not in that business.
Oh, hang on a minute, I am.
Arianna's business is the same as mine. She sloughs off opinions hither and yon - in print, on TV, on radio. Much as I do. Except she's far more successful than I am. When you surf the channels, she's never not on. Yet her business claimed a net loss of a quarter-million dollars last year, while I paid a ton of tax. And I'm not sure I'd know how to claim over $400,000 in expenses anyway.
Much to my regret, the columnar business is not the most lucrative in the world, but I've always found that, aside from coffee and typing paper, the overheads are pretty low. Arienron - I'm sorry, I mean Arianna - says the business is "cyclical" because she's been doing research. $2.7 million is a hell of a lot of photocopying at the library.
Now the Los Angeles Times was careful not to imply that Arianna's doing anything illegal. But the candidate is a classic tax-and-spend liberal. And, when it comes to tax-and-spend, if you're advocating a ton of the latter, you could at least make a contribution toward the former. The average Californian, tossing more and more of his income down the black hole of the bloated state government's deficit, might be disinclined to take lessons in tax policy from someone who doesn't pay any.
Nor if I were your big-time chief executive would I take lectures from Arianna on the need to clamp down on offshore tax havens such as Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. The ability of businesses to nominally "relocate" to a post office box in the Caribbean is one of the few things holding the tax rates down: you can imagine what they'd be like if the havens didn't exist.
But they always will, somewhere on the planet, and so will loopholes. The more loopholes you close, the more artfully crafted new loopholes bubble up somewhere else along the way. When they drop the big one, the first things to crawl out from the smouldering rubble will be the proverbial cockroach and a brand new post-nuclear tax loophole. When Arienron rages against loopholes for "fat cats", all she means is that the fat cats are doing exactly what she does: hiring the best professional advice to arrange her tax affairs in the most favourable manner. By contrast, if you're, say, a single-mom waitress at Glory Jean's Diner out on Highway 73 just past the rusting grain elevator, you can't access that level of advice.
So you just pay up.
That's why if Arianna was really interested in all the little people she claims to speak for, she'd realise she's looking at this thing upside down. You can't eliminate loopholes, but you can eliminate the need for loopholes. When you have a low-rate simple tax code, everyone pays, even Arienron, even her fellow fat cats. The more complex it gets, the more unfair it is on those who can't afford a tax lawyer.
That's also a good general principle in government. California's government is a mess because there's too much of it.
Some of it sounds nice and cuddly and "compassionate" in theory - the dog food allowance for blind people - but it's hellish in practice once you've set up a unionised government bureaucracy to administer it. When government tries to do everything, it winds up not doing anything well. It should not be in the dog food business.
That's also the lesson of September 11th. There was an almost pathetic symbolism in the way, on that grim morning, President Bush was notified of a savage attack on US territory as he was sitting in a Florida grade-school classroom about to read a story to children. The federal government has no constitutional responsibility for education; it's the job of states and towns. But education, like a prescription drug programme for seniors, is one of those issues the voters keep telling pollsters is very important to them, and so the President, instead of concentrating on being commander-in-chief, spends more and more time playing pharmacist-in-chief and schoolmarm-in-chief. After September 11th, Democrats tried to argue that it demonstrated the need for big government. On the contrary, it demonstrated the need for small government, government that stays focused on its core functions.
It's strange to me how tone deaf Arianna Huffington's campaign has been. Arnold Schwarzenegger is trying to tap the anger that's brought this recall campaign so far - the people who are fed up with runaway spending, high taxes, bureaucratic featherbedding. Arianna seems to think there's another kind of anger out there - people who are angry because they want more government programmes, more spending, more bureaucracies, and they'd be prepared to pay higher taxes for these blessings. Hey, I would too in her shoes. After all if you tripled Arianna's state income tax bill, you'd get, let's see now, three times zero equals zero.