People With Money Making the Right Decisions

Sometimes when you're writing you want to hold on to the funny thing and put it right at the very end of what you're doing where it will become an entertaining surprise BANANA. See what I did there? Look again closely if you are not quite getting the design of this elementary lesson in comedy BANANA.

In this case, though, it is to our advantage to blow an obvious punchline early because someone has written A Thing that gets more entertainingly excruciating as it goes on not just for the all-endumbening idiocy of the argument, but for the position of its finger-pointing author.

What do you know about Zachary Leeman? My guess is NOTHING, you lucky lucky person, but for you I will ruin the whole thing. Here is his bio:

Zachary Leeman currently serves in the Unites States Army Reserves as a truck driver in the 619th Transportation Company. He attends Southern Maine Community College where he plans on getting an Associate's Degree in political science. He is currently hard at work on his first novel. You can follow him on Twitter @writingleeman.

Okay, got that? Zachary Leeman is a public employee going to a public college where he's trying to get a degree involving public business. Oh, and HE WINS ALREADY:



Am I an official hater? I filled in the forms but I haven't mailed them yet.

Anyway Zachary Leeman has written a dumb column:

Bestselling horror novelist Stephen King recently helped out his fellow Mainers by holding a contest through his Bangor-based radio station: however much money listeners donated, King would match. The money would then be donated to lower-income Mainers to help pay for heat this winter.

King raised $242,370. Not too shabby. Clearly, this is a commendable and gracious effort on the part of King. It says a lot about his character. But when you bring it into context with past King quotes and his overall liberalism, it brings up an interesting hypocrisy in what famous liberals and 1 percent types do and say.

Okay person who drives trucks for the government and goes to a public college, what kind of hypocrisy have you identified?

In the past, King has stated that he thinks people who make as much as he does should be taxed as much as 50 percent. Why?

To pay for people who drive trucks for the government and for their education in public colleges.

Has King fully thought about a world where 50 percent of his money is taken by Big Government and then they decide where it goes?

Perhaps more people could get jobs driving trucks for the government and for their education in public colleges.

Just because it goes to the government with the “best intentions” does not mean it will help heat fellow Mainers’ homes.

It might, though, be something of a boon to people who drive trucks for the government and who receive education in public colleges.

Yet liberal entertainers like King continue to beg Obama to tax them more when they are fully capable as individuals who have found financial success to use their disposable income anyway they see fit, including helping those they see as needy.

Aha! HYPO— No wait, that's not actually hypocrisy, budding-writer-who-drives-a-truck-for-the-government-and-who-gets-educated-at-a-public-college-in-obvious-need-of-funding-for-dictionaries, it appears that Stephen King is willing to pay more taxes and that is that, and those taxes may or may not help folks directly with a heating bill, but you can bet they help people who drive trucks for the government and who receive education in public colleges.

How Stephen King has not connected his actions with his beliefs is really quite amazing.

Has he imagined a world where the government taxed him less?

No, he has never imagined an America without taxes. And my guess is that a person who drives trucks for the government and goes to a public college might also find it unfathomable.

Imagine how much more good he could do with that disposable income!?

Here is where, on the initial read, I doubled back and re-read what Zachary-the-Government-Truck-Driver wrote: the premise here really does appear to be that Stephen King could, if taxed even less, be oh-so-much-more generous to people who can't afford to keep the power on in their fucking houses in the greatest and richest country in the world. Not to mention that King might donate to public college endowments! The world would be a better place if zillionaires could keep more money away from the payrolls of drivers of government trucks and students in college because they could then in fact give all that money back to the people who don't have the money that was taken away from them! Nobody needs Robin Hood when Prince John is willingly giving all his money to the unfortunates, which I believe he in fact did which is why there was no Robin Hood legend in the first place.

Or not. It’s really his choice. When giving becomes forced giving, then the whole act has lost merit.

So if we imagine that Stephen King is giving charitably now, and then volunteers to pay taxes for things like public colleges and OMG TURN LEFT QUICKLY OR THE GOVERNMENT TRUCK WILL CRASH there we go JesusChristthatwasclose. Anyway, Stephen King volunteering to pay taxes is Stephen King forcing himself to give away the money he was giving anyway? O THE NOT-HYPOCRISY-AT-ALL.

And in a time of crushing student debt and an overstretched military slowly pulling back from two dumb wars, rising poverty and job losses and predatory foreclosure nightmares and empty strip-malls and idle factories precipitated by crazy rich guys trading bullshit paper they didn't even know how to measure the worth of, not to mention a time of people in Maine who can't pay their heating costs, Zachary Leeman provides a sweet little gift just for you and I:

Why is it liberals cannot imagine a world where people with money make the right decisions?

Thank you, gently-insulated-from-the-real-free-enterprise-world Zachary Leeman, for redistributing the gifts of the free time and the totally-serious-no-fooling book-learning the government has given you to we few participants on this little corner of the internet. And you know something, gentle reader? There's still more of the column left for you look at BANANA.