Not Getting What He Pays For

The LA Times looks at a new book called The Fiscal Cliff, which the patriarch of the family who owns the Chicago Cubs helped fund to push his case for lower government spending and more tax cuts for rich folks.  Unfortunately for him (but hilariously for me), things didn't go planned:

Selahattin, 54, and Ayse, 53, are the authors of "The Fiscal Cliff," a book published by a Ricketts nonprofit called Ending Spending, which normally ranks Washington politicians by their support of a federal spending cap. The organization released the book last week with great fanfare, announcing that it was sending a copy to every congressional and Senate office in Washington, evidently to advance its position that government is too big and taxes are too high.
That's the point made in the book's introduction by Brian Baker, the president of Ending Spending.
As it happens, however, the Imrohoroglus' book doesn't quite say that. In some respects, their take may be just the opposite: Tax revenues are too low and government can't be shrunk just like that.
"We've got tax revenues at 15% of GDP," Selahattin Imrohoroglu says. "You've got to come back to the '80s and '90s." In those decades, tax revenues averaged 19.5% of gross domestic product; were that ratio in place today, it would mean additional revenue for the federal government of more than $700 billion a year, "and then all the gloom and doom projections go away."
The Imrohoroglus didn't even learn until their manuscript was finished that it would be published with Baker's introduction, or for that matter that the publisher would be Ending Spending. And it doesn't sound as if they were especially overjoyed at the news.
"I read the proposed introduction and said, 'This is some political statement that has nothing to do with the book,'" Selahattin says. He had to type "Ending Spending" into Google to figure out what it was.

Maybe Mr. Ricketts ought to put his business acumen into getting his Cubs to not suck as opposed to trying to create a bogus argument for taxing him less.  Of course, I'm perfectly happy with the Cubs sucking, and I think it is hilarious that his "nonprofit foundation" paid to publish a book that explicitly argues against his position.  Unfortunately, conservatives have been able to convince the rubes that tax cuts for super rich people will benefit them.  They won't.