A CASE OF THE GIGGLES

By CALVIN TRILLIN

I wish I didn't keep making a connection between people who believe in a flat tax and people who believe in a flat earth. The vision I can't seem to get out of my head has Steve Forbes as both Ferdinand and Isabella, smiling his dorky smile under two different powdered wigs while economists from the Brookings Institution demonstrate with the same apple Columbus used that there would be a shortfall in federal revenues of $186 billion a year.

"We are not amused," Forbes says, suddenly emitting the maniacal giggle we all fear is lurking in him. It's the sort of giggle Mozart had in Amadeus.

I've had these disquieting visions before. There was an episode in 1982, when I was convinced that a couple vacationing in the Caribbean had witnessed a voodoo-economics ritual. In a jungle clearing, they'd watched people chanting "VOOdoo, VOOdoo--trickle, trickle, trickle, trickle."

Could it be that the prospect of lifting the tax burden borne by rich people tends to make me feverish?

Maybe. Remember David Stockman? During the first Reagan term--a period that I and, I assume, many eminent economists have referred to ever since as Voodoo I--Stockman admitted that the supposed tax-reform bill the President managed to get through Congress was actually a "Trojan horse" whose real purpose was tax breaks for the rich.

I had trouble getting that horse out of my mind. On the outside, it varied from a regular horse only in its size and in the fact that it occasionally said, "Clear that with my accountant." Its inside, though, where machine tools and Learjets depreciated in a gooey vat of oil-depletion allowances, looked like the stomach in an antacid commercial.

These visions of mine are, I know, anathema to the Bigger Pie wing of the Republican Party. The piemeisters, whether they talk about trickle down or supply side or a flat tax that doesn't apply to interest income or a repeal of the capital-gains tax, are believers in one simple proposition: the less rich people pay in taxes, the better off the rest of us are.

To state it that way, I realize, is to invite accusations of engaging in class warfare. I might as well admit I am among those who find a bit of class warfare diverting on days when there's no professional wrestling on TV. Those of us who feel that way were relieved to see Forbes enter the race. We'd been flummoxed by the Republican assumption last year that, for purposes of a $500-a-child tax credit, anyone who makes up to $200,000 a year is middle class. If practically everyone is the same class, we kept thinking, who is left for us to make war on? Now we know. Steve Forbes. The man is stinking rich.

Now we class warriors can point out sullenly that if you were trying to write off a chateau in Normandy and a palace in Tangier and a 727 while claiming that what looks like an estate in New Jersey is a cattle ranch, you'd find the current tax code complicated too.

I see the combatants gathered on a vast field. At one end, an ill-kempt mob is armed mainly with monkey wrenches and backyard barbecue forks. At the other end is a neat line of arrogant-looking men in red suspenders, ready to defend themselves with squash racquets. Behind them, their leader sits erect on a Trojan horse, wearing two powdered wigs. There is silence. Then the air is pierced by a maniacal giggle.

Charge!