Day: July 25, 2000

(Why Don’t We) Hate The Rich

    In a recent Salon.Com article, Steve Bodow is aghast that in a Gallup poll 60 percent of Americans favored abolishing the federal estate tax (No relief). Only a vast right wing misinformation campaign could be responsible for such misguided views on the part of the American public. After all, the poor and middle class should hate the rich, not want to hand them an $850 billion gift (Bodow’s term for the tax cut).

    Why don’t people hate the rich anymore?

    Part of the problem is that in many ways the average American is rich him or herself by historical standards. In the lead-in to his anti-wealth diatribe, Bodow claims that the Congress wants to restore American to “pre-abolition America — where the rich were rich and the poor were chattel…” Of course by the economic standards of the 1850s, my neighbors who subsist on welfare are unbelievably well off. Rather than envy or hate prosperity, almost all Americans are the beneficiaries of unimagined levels of personal wealth and income levels.

    Second, thanks to the mass media and our own expanded interactions with people, Americans have connections with the rich and an understanding of how they got rich that previous generations didn’t. Bodow blasts the Heritage Foundation for claiming the estate tax will rob minority businessmen, while in truth according to Bodow it affects largely white men. Fine, but when he dies does Michael Jordan really deserve to have half of his estate confiscated by the state simply because he was wildly successful and entertained billions of people? Do Bill Gates or Steve Jobs deserve to have half their estate confiscated because they revolutionized the personal computer industry?

    On a smaller scale, I’ve met and talked with many people starting their own businesses who are working their butts off putting 60 to 70 hour weeks in to get off the ground. Some of them will fail, others will be wildly successful. What sort of screwy tax system reserves a special confiscatory tax only for the wildly successful of the bunch? Maybe to folks like Bodow this makes sense, but to a lot of Americans this seems downright bizarre.

    It’s even more bizarre, of course, to take that money and then give it to the federal government. This is almost worse than just taking the assets and burning them. I assume, for example, that Michael Jordan will probably want to leave assets for his children and family as well as putting a lot of his money into non-profit foundations. That makes a lot more sense than giving it to the U.S. government so they can buy attack helicopters to help death squads in Colombia or for creating a worldwide eavesdropping network such as Echelon (or just the run-of-the-mill pork barrel projects that tax money gets wasted on).

    The wealthy, like the rest of us, have already paid ridiculously high income and other assorted taxes throughout their lives. Making the most successful Americans cough up half their estates when they die in order to feed government coffers is an idea so profoundly stupid that people hardly need right wing think tanks to tell them it’s a bad idea.

Number of Animals Used for Medical Experiments Increases in the UK

The Labour government in Great Britain won’t win any friends among animal rights activists when it announces sometime in August that for the first time since the early 1970s, the number of animals used in medical experiments in the UK rose for two consecutive years. While courting animal activist votes in 1996, the Labour Party promised a special commission to reduce the number of animals used in experiments.

According to government figures, the number of animals used increased 1 percent in 1998 and could have increased up to 3 percent in 1999. Why?

Part of the problem is the way the UK counts the number of animals used in experiments. The big increase is occurring in areas of genetic engineering experiments. In many of these experiments an animals, such as a mouse, is genetically modified and then an experiment is conducted on the mouse. Under the way the UK measures the number of animals used in research, there is a strong possibility that the mouse will be counted twice — once when it is genetically modified and then again when the experiment is carried out.

Still even with this double counting problem, the sheer explosion in human knowledge about genetic engineering has probably led to an increase in the number of animal experiments being conducted in Great Britain and around the world. That should be hailed as a good thing, since it represents scientists getting ever closer to treatments for debilitating and deadly human diseases, but instead the Labour Party clearly fears the reaction from animal rights activists.

Meanwhile although the number of animals used for medical research is rising, it’s not rising nearly fast enough for medical researchers. More than 100 British scientists, including five Nobel Prize winners, recently signed a letter arguing that the UK’s onerous regulation of animal experiments was holding back important research that would inevitably be driven abroad unless the government streamlines the process. According to the letter.

Researchers using animals are already in a situation where overseas competitors can complete a series of experiments and be exploiting the results before permission to start would be given in the UK. If this situation persists or gets worse, as it has recently, it appears inevitable that a substantial part of the UK’s research effort, in many vital areas, will either become uncompetitive or forced abroad.

Animal rights activists such as the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection’s Michelle Thew reacted predictably that in fact the regulations don’t go far enough. “I’m staggered that they are calling for less animal regulation when the regulations we have aren’t working properly,” Thew said.

Professor Nancy Rothwell of Manchester University said that new paperwork requirements can cause research applications to run 50 to 100 pages in excruciating detail, and delay approval of research involving animals by 6 months or more.

Sources:

Red tape on animal experiments hold Britain back, say scientists. Nigel Hawkes, The Times (UK), June 13, 2000.

Animal testing appeal sparks protest. The BBC. June 13, 2000.

Second rise in animal experiments alarm ministers. Nigel Hawkes. The Times (UK). July 24, 2000.