SO there we were, peacefully minding each other’s business at the local home of fine food and wine when Luke the Dude walked in. “Yes! Yes! Yes!” greeted he, “How do you feel about paying a skin colour tax?”
The convivial company of conversationalists were, as per habit, congregating to interrogate the problems of our town and the world.
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Bob the Book protested: “Such a racist thing wouldn’t even be legal!”
“Legal?” wide-eyed Luke the Dude. “No less a personage than a highly learned judge says we must.”
“Which judge,” enquired Stevie the Poet, “John Hlophe?”
“Not even,” grinned Luke, “Dunstan Mlambo, a front-runner to be our Chief Justice as we speak, that’s who.”
“Please elaborate,” requested The Prof.
“Happy to Prof,” bowed Luke the Dude. “Last month Stellenbosch University had its yearly ‘social justice summit’, where Mlambo flighted plans for inspanning the courts to sort out the haves. Wealth must be redistributed – ‘social parity’ for all.”
“That one,” frowned Jean-Jay, “fancy words for stealing from the rich to do very little for the poor. Right?”
“That would be a big improvement,” observed Colin the Golfer. “Currently we have the ANC and EFF stealing from both the rich and the poor to enrich themselves, eh Boyo!”
“Quite so,” nodded Miss Lily. “The result is that one in three workers have no job, the state machinery has been run into the ground and people live in squalor. I think we can all agree that South Africa must do better?”
All agreed.
“Hmmm,” frowned Big Ben, “so where is this tax on skin colour that Luke the Dude is blabbing about?”
“A ha!” blabbed Luke, “at the same ‘social justice summit’ Prof Tshepo Madlingozi, who deals in ‘applied legal studies’, explained the fancy words: Not mere redistribution; fully race-based redistribution. I have the quote from Daily Maverick: ‘We need to be honest,’ said Madlingozi, ‘… the idea that you can achieve social justice without white people losing something, is ridiculous.’
“Happy Ben?”
“So,” mused Bill the Beard, “the Radical Economic Transformation of the Zuma insurrectionists and Malema’s EFF U, together with the ANC’s land reform – which includes land theft – are alive and well in academia and the highest courts of the land. And making no bones about their targets being white.”
“Let’s think about it,” contemplated The Prof, drawing slowly on his pipe (we were outside in the garden, Nkosazana). “The reality is that we live in a country where fellow citizens of all skin colours are unemployed, untrained and dirt poor. Many make do without running water, functional sewage, public transport, protection from crime … solutions must be sought.”
“Useless!” exclaimed Jon the Joker. “All of these problems are caused by the failed ANC government who ran a successful industrial economy into the ground with my-turn-to-eat greed and incompetence. People are unemployed – useless ANC labour policies. People are untrained – useless ANC education system. People have lost hope – dependence on hand-outs. Water, sewage, transport – all caused by ANC failure to deliver basic services, plain and simple.
“And how do they approach the problem? With fantasies about entrenched apartheid – three decades after apartheid ended. That is moral and intellectual cowardice. The so-called solutions these learned judges and professors offer are stuck in the obsolete past: blame apartheid; make the whites pay.”
“Let’s just strip it down,” resumed the Prof. “They pursue social justice – we can have a whole conversation just about that – by means of twin solutions. In plain language: Tax the rich to help the poor. Take from whites to give to blacks.
“The promoters of these solutions take it for granted that this will repair the tangled mess the ANC has made of our country. It won’t.”
“Fact is,” agreed Stevie the Poet, “those interventions are already in force and have been for a long time. It’s called progressive income tax. Really poor people pay no income tax. You start paying at earnings above R87’300 a year and then the rate is 18% – which goes up as your income increases. The highest rate is 45%, for people earning over R1.5 million. Add in VAT and all the other taxes, and the wealthy pay more than half their income to benefit the rest of us.
“So, there you have it: Taxing the rich to help the poor.”
“True but useless,” opined Jon the Joker. “The spanner in the piggy bank is having the ANC in charge of spending all those taxes; and we have seen them in action. Can’t even be trusted with food parcels for the poor.”
“Agreed,” nodded Miss Lily, “you cannot punish the donors of the parcels for that.”
“And the other leg, taking from whites to give to blacks?” challenged Bob the Book.
“I’ll take it from here,” insisted Luke the Dude, “I have Dave Steward of the FW de Klerk Foundation to thank for the figures: In 1992, as SA was preparing for transition to an ANC government, the IMF investigated the feasibility of a redistribution tax. They discovered that white South Africans pay 32% of their combined income to the taxman – while getting only 8.7% back in services like health and education. The IMF calls that a relative tax burden. At 23.3%, it was more than three times that of France and Germany and twice that of Canada, the second highest.
“Since then, this burden grew non-stop as the ANC introduced subsidies for black people, while whites increasingly covered their own schooling, medical expenses and security.
“So, there you have it: You are already paying a rather large skin colour tax, sir.”
“This while our GDP keeps shrinking in the hands of the ANC,” sighed The Prof. “And they think they’ll get more loot with yet another tax. Greedy and incompetent governments repel investors: more jobs destroyed and more people in poverty.
“Instead of cutting a shrinking cake into ever more slices, the well-known secret of success is to bake a bigger cake – get out of the way of the bakers!”
And with that, dear reader, the convivial confederacy wish you a joyful festive season and a most fulfilling 2022!
