Musk Rat

 I confess: I am a sucker for statements like this one: "A teacher shouldn’t pay a higher tax rate than a profitable company. It’s time we reward work in this country—not just wealth." That's a tweet from the forty-sixth President of the United States. It is especially nice to hear after the week I had in which I did a little bit of everything at my school site. Including the teaching part. Moved furniture. Set up for picture day. Brought extra costumes for Spirit Week. Delivered breakfast to hungry kids in classrooms. Taught third grade for a morning before launching into an afternoon of PE. Set up a canopy for handing out the Harvest of the Month, and then distributing stickers to all those brave grade-schoolers who were willing to taste-drive a tomato.

The idea that billionaires pay less in taxes than I do each year pains me in the way that only fourth grade boys can be pained when they smell something that isn't fair. Which is actually kind of interesting, since obviously I didn't choose my tax bracket. My tax bracket chose me. And when the question comes up about do I want to pay more so that kids can have things like universal pre-kindergarten, I don't flinch. Yes, I will pay more in taxes to support that safety net that is sometimes the difference between seeing families return to my school. Or not.

My heart won't stop bleeding. I was made this way. Much, I suppose, in the same way Elon Musk was hatched spouting things like, "Eventually, they run out of other people’s money and then they come for you." Not sure exactly if he was angling for sympathy or if he was merely huffing about the annoyance of being asked to pay his fair share of the burden placed on the rest of us. You know, the common folk. The ones who didn't name their children after a bar code. Don't they understand that Mister Musk has a space race to deal with? You want him to spend any portion of the money that could possibly go into rockets to the moon or Mars or to launch the next interstellar chain of coffee houses, you had better ask nicely. 

Because Elon, which I believe is Finnish for "idjit," does not feel any of that pull to help pay for the roads or the schools or the airspace that he will most certainly soon be leaving. The notion of taxing the rich is nothing new, but each passing year brings more of a disparity between the haves and the have not so muchs. Making the jump to warp wealth is a trick of physics or finance or both that most of us will never achieve. But Idjit Musk would like us to believe that when the government is done making his life more difficult, they will come looking for us. Can't we just leave him and his odd little family alone? He's trying to make a life for himself here on our planet until the call comes from his home world and he sheds the human suit he's been wearing all these years and leaps onto the next departing vacuum tube. Taking his big bag of money with him. 

That'll teach us.