Posted on 04/18/2011 4:03:17 PM PDT by passionfruit
Song of the Week #183 by George Harrison
Today is Tax Day in America. It's supposed to be April 15th, but because April 16th is Emancipation Day in the District of Columbia and because April 16th fell on a Saturday, the observance of Emancipation Day was moved to Friday April 15th, which meant that federal employees were given the day off, so Tax Day was moved to Monday April 18th. If you follow that, you're a better man than I. After all, very few taxpayers live in the District of Columbia, so who's at work on the day you mail your tax return is hardly an issue. What matters is whether anyone there's on the day it arrives. And come to that, most of us don't mail it to DC but to regional filing centers. But, at any rate, that's why today and not Friday represents America's formal Emancipation Day from what H & R Block and co like to dignify as "Tax Season". As I said on the radio a couple of weeks ago, the acceptance of that term is not a good sign: Baseball should have a season, but not tax. Nevertheless, in the insolvent republic, on this day the season of 1040s and 1099s draws to a close, and so, as we do with Summer and Autumn, we offer a song for said season.
For the first half of Tin Pan Alley's history, tax barely rated a mention in popular song. Before the Second World War, I can think of just two well-known ditties that even broach the subject, and then only in fifth or sixth choruses that rarely if ever get sung. Gus Kahn was the lyricist of not only our very first Song of the Week, but the second, too: "San Francisco" and "Dream A Little Dream Of Me", respectively. Long before either hit, he wrote one of those defining anthems of the Jazz Age, in 1921 with Richard Whiting and Raymond Egan. "Ain't We Got Fun?" is a breezy rejoinder to straitened times:
Ev'ry morning Ev'ry evening Ain't We Got Fun? Not much money Oh, but honey Ain't We Got Fun?
Several verses and choruses later, the song wraps up:
Streetcar seats Are awful narrow Ain't We Got Fun? They won't smash up Our Pierce Arrow We ain't got none They've cut my wages But my income tax will be so much smaller When I'm paid off I'll be laid off Ain't We Got Fun?
Thirteen years later, Cole Porter briefly touched on the theme in the seventh chorus of his peerless laundry list:
You're The Top! You're the Tower of Babel You're The Top! You're the Whitney stable By the river Rhine You're a foaming stein Of beer You're a dress from Saks's You're next year's taxes You're stratosphere!
The stratosphere was a relatively novel concept back then, having been discovered simultaneously by Richard Assman and Léon Teisserenc de Bort in 1902. But it was not until tax itself soared into the stratosphere that the state's revenue collectors secured a permanent place in the musical repertoire:
Let me tell you how it will be There's one for you, nineteen for me 'Cause I’m the Taxman Yeah, I’m the Taxman…
It was April 1966. The Beatles were earning serious money. They'd been having hits for three years, of course, but in show business it can be some time before the royalties roll in, and it took a couple of annual returns before the scale of the Fab Four's success made itself felt in their declarable earnings: not just hit singles in Britain, but Number Ones in America, and Canada and Australia, and Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway; and not just Number One singles but Number One albums, and compilation albums; and not just platinum albums, but double platinum, triple platinum, quintuple platinum, albums that keep selling and selling; and not just studio albums but soundtrack albums for films, films in which you also star... The Beatles were making more money than anyone had ever made in British pop music. And then they noticed that very little of it was going to them. The difference between being, on the one hand, Cliff Richard or Adam Faith and, on the other, the Beatles was hardly worth it. "'Taxman'," said George Harrison, "was when I first realised that, even though we had started earning money, we were actually giving most of it away in taxes."
Harold Wilson's Labour Party had been elected in 1964, and in an early example of the political class' now routine modish pandering had had the Queen make all four moptops Members of the Order of the British Empire. Cute. You get a nice ribbon, and a medal. If only Mr Wilson had confined his innovations to inducting pop stars into chivalric orders. But among the Labour Government's other novelties was a new marginal tax rate, a "supertax" for the "super rich" of 95 per cent. American fans of the song sometimes fail to appreciate that its opening lines are not a bit of literary license but a bald statement of fact:
Let me tell you how it will be There's one for you, nineteen for me...
That's to say, out of every pound, Her Majesty's Treasury took 19 shillings for themselves, and you got to keep the one remaining shilling. So who cares whether you go double platinum or triple? It's Nigel and Derek at the Inland Revenue who should be following the hit parade ups and downs, and lip-synching for you on "Top Of The Pops" come to that. After all, they'll see more of the loot than you ever will.
This was all new to Harrison. Not until he sat down with his accountant did he understand that, while he was free to make as much money as he wanted, he would never get to spend most of it. Born in anger, "Taxman" wound up rather sardonic. Like innumerable rock'n'roll numbers, the song begins with a traditional count-off:
One, two, three, four...
Personally, I’ve always found this device rather boring – not an indication of “raw” “energy” but instead the literal paint-by-numbers tedium of rock. However, in this instance, the count-off’s not in the same tempo as the music that follows, and functions more as a droll pun, representing the eponymous taxman peeling off pound notes. I’d be interested to know whether that was George’s inspiration, or maybe John’s – Lennon claimed he’d provided a few “one-liners” for the number, as Harrison was relatively inexperienced at songwriting – or perhaps it was George Martin’s idea as producer. Whatever the origin, it sets the tone for the song: “Taxman” uses all the tricks of rock’n’roll – notably driving repetition – but in the cause of ramming home a message of statist authority. As if to emphasize that there’s something not quite kosher about this, the one musical novelty is the lop-sided length of the main phrase - a conventional eight-bar couplet yoked to a five-bar explanation thereof. In combination, the 13 bars sound both utterly routine and faintly menacing:
Should five per cent appear too small Be thankful I don't take it all 'Cause I’m the Taxman Yeah, I’m the Taxman...
Harrison had written his first song in 1963, in an hotel room in Bournemouth just to see if he could do it. "Don't Bother Me" made it onto the With The Beatles LP, but it’s safe to say that in the spring of 1966 nobody thought of George as a songwriting Beatle. “Taxman” was Side One Track One of Revolver, and the first Harrison number really to land. The conventional wisdom on Beatles songwriting is that John did all the serious social content and Paul did the best love songs. But I’m not so sure, over the long haul, that George won’t best both men in both categories. In the late Sixties and Seventies, everybody did “Yesterday” (Paul) and “Something” (George), but the former seems awfully insipid if you’ve ever seen Shirley Bassey or Sinatra biting off the latter (Frank’s was Harrison’s favorite version). Likewise, John was the ne plus ultra of showbiz leftists but, while the rubes lap up the marshmallow nihilism of “Imagine”, it’s heartening to know he wasn’t dumb enough to swallow it himself: he may have sung “imagine there’s no countries” but he was happy enough to give money to the IRA to advance the cause of moving a small chunk of real estate from one irrelevant country to another. By contrast, "Taxman" was the first explicit glimpse into how pop stars really live. Rock'n'roll is one of the most ruthlessly capitalist enterprises on earth, and its most successful proponents pioneered the trick of being "socially liberal/fiscally conservative" long before squishy blue-state Republican governors attempted the straddle.
But Harrison wasn't merely - like David Bowie, when he issued bonds in himself a few years back - looking out for Number One and the bottom line; he was something of a genuine philosopher. Not the hippie-dippie Hare Krishna philosophy, but the real thing. In 1969, in the course of a wide-ranging ramble, George briefly detoured out of the Maharishi chants into some remarks about the Monopolies Commission (the British equivalent of the US government’s Antitrust Division):
You know, this is the thing I don’t like. It’s the Monopolies Commission. Now if anybody, you know, Kodak, or somebody is cleaning up the market with film, the Monopolies Commission, the government send them in there, and say you know, you’re not allowed to monopolize. Yet, when the government’s monopolizing, who’s gonna send in, you know, this Commission to sort that one out?
Good question. There was an old joke in Britain: “Why is there only one Monopolies Commission?” In fact, it’s an incisive observation on the nature of government. We wouldn’t like it if there were only one automobile company or only one breakfast cereal, but by definition there can only be one government — which is why, "when the government’s monopolizing", it should do so only in very limited areas. Harrison got that and expressed it in almost Friedmanite terms fortysomething years ago - just as he also grasped the essential nature of a tax regime. Alan Keyes, during his entertainingly doomed presidential run of 2000, liked to pose a question to the crowd: If the income tax rate is 20 per cent (or 30 per cent, or 40), how much of your income does the government control?
Someone would always answer 20 per cent (or 30, or 40), and Keyes would patiently correct them: No, the government controls 100 per cent of your income - because you have to justify the part you keep. Tax is about control, as the patter section of "Taxman" makes plain:
If you drive a car, I’ll tax the street If you try to sit, I’ll tax your seat If you get too cold, I’ll tax the heat If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet 'Cause I’m the Taxman Yeah, I’m the Taxman…
I love the way the weenier rock critics piously explain that these examples are humorously exaggerated for rhetorical effect. Harrison's view of the Revenue as a micro-regulatory tyranny has come to pass. I employ a young lady who works for me in New York City. A few months back, we received a notice at corporate HQ in New Hampshire that we had failed to pay the "New York Commuter Mobility Tax". This is a tax on businesses that operate in New York to cover the infrastructure deterioration caused by employees leaving home for the office every morning and vice-versa every evening: "If you drive a car, I'll tax the street". As it happens, my employee works from her home. But we still have to pay the "commuter mobility tax". She commutes from her bedroom to whichever room she keeps the computer in: "If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet." When I mentioned this on the radio, she emailed back: "It's worse than you think. I live in a studio apartment." In effect, New York taxes her (or rather me) for sitting down in her own home: "If you try to sit, I'll tax your seat." As for "If you get too cold, I'll tax the heat", how else would you sum up carbon credits? A year or two back, in the interests of "taxing heat" to save the planet, the European Union was considering a levy per cow on bovine flatulence emissions. Even Harrison didn't foresee that one:
If you own a farm, I’ll tax your cart If you own a cow, I’ll tax his fart 'Cause I’m the Taxman Yeah, I’m the Taxman...
But he got to the heart of the matter:
Now my advice for those who die Declare the pennies on your eyes 'Cause I’m the Taxman Yeah, I’m the Taxman. And you're working for no one but me.
On Tax Day 2011 in America, there are no 95 per cent marginal rates. When you do that, as Harold Wilson discovered, the celebrity class tends to decamp, as the likes of Roger Moore and Michael Caine did, to Switzerland and Hollywood. And, however they toe the party line on world poverty or climate change, their very mailing address is more potent a political statement than anything else. So today Big Government leaves the super-rich to twitter on about sustainable development and gay marriage and other topics and instead levies the supertax on generations of children and grandchildren as yet unborn. The last thing Obama needs is any of his Hollywood pals trending Harrison-like on the government monopoly.
In that sense, "Taxman" is a rare bit of genuine counter-culture to emerge from the Sixties. But statism is shameless and happy to co-opt whatever's to hand: On recent Tax Days, as the clock ticks down to closing hour, post offices have taken to blasting Harrison's song out to last minute taxpayers shuffling patiently in line. Yeah, they're the Taxman and they're telling you how it will be...
Happy Tax Day. Happy Emancipation Day.
For your Mark Steyn ping list.
Let me guess that the 95% tax didn’t last because when they reached it, they just stopped working.
I don’t know where he’s getting his information, but federal employees were not given the day off on Friday. Maybe DC employees were, but not the feds.
TC
Considering the headline, thought you should be pinged. :-)
I think the federal employees in DC did get the day off, but not elsewhere.
“Let me guess that the 95% tax didn’t last because when they reached it, they just stopped working.”
No, they just left and never went back.
Oddly enough, since I am not a Beatles fan, I did not know the song existed when I chose my FR “handle.”
I still am not a Beatles fan, but I do like that particular song, since it was written in the same anger that I have towards our tax system!
Initially, I was not going to hijack this thread to advocate for the FairTax, but, what the heck:
We will never be a FRee people until we replace the income tax with a National Retail Sales Tax and abolish the IRS!
Bump for that!
Pure Steyn gold!
You can listen to the song here. http://www.megavideo.com/?v=FCPGOM9B
Thank you!
Incorrect, Passionfruit: we did not. As I said, maybe employees of the District did, but we feds did not.
TC
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