An Open Letter to Eric Cantor

Dear Congressman Cantor,

On behalf of all of us patriotic, hard-working billionaires, we want to commend you for standing up for us during the debt ceiling negotiations.

We know that, without your courage in walking out of the negotiations today, we might have faced devastating tax increases that would severely limit our lifestyles. We don't have to tell you how hard this recession has been on us. Many of us have had to sell our fourth, and even third, homes. A good friend of ours actually had to cancel his ski trip to Aspen. Well, technically he didn't cancel it, but he did have to get a refund for the third week. And technically he did end up spending that week in Vegas, snorting coke from the belly button of a very expensive hooker. But, he had to fly commercial. On a U.S. carrier, no less!

And yet, in this our most trying hour, some in Washington want to raise our taxes a little bit. Many of us would be forced to make horrible choices, between paying the undocumented workers who weed our gardens and paying the undocumented workers who clean our yachts. Do those fools you work with understand the humiliation we feel when we have to order the 1996 Chateau Lafitte instead of the far superior 1973? This is not the America we were taught to love at Exeter and Choate.

Thanks to you, we won't have to face such awful choices. We know some say that by walking out of negotiations, you have all but guaranteed the U.S. will default on its debt and send the country spiralling into recession and ruin. But we want you to rest easy, knowing that we will be ok, as most of us will be able to transfer our assets to the Cayman Islands and refurbiush our apartments in Paris. We Americans will get through this together! And by "we Americans," we mean those of us who have offshore accounts.

We also know that some of your opponents have called you a chickenshit for walking out of the negotiations right when the talk turned to tax increases, letting John Boehner take the fall. Fools! To them we say, "Eric Cantor is no chickenshit!"

No, sir, you are quite the opposite of a chickenshit. Indeed, you are an eagleshit, passing your way through the digestive tract of this great nation of ours, coming out the other side stronger, more powerful, pungent with the aromas of liberty and freedom!

And when all is said and done, when the history of this troubled time is written, probably in Mandarin Chinese since that will likely be the world's dominant language in 10 to 15 years, let it be said that you - you alone - stood up for the working man, the hedge fund manager, the professional baseball player, the oil company executive, the owner of the chicken processing plant who tills the fields and puts his shoulder to the grindstone and hires one of the Big Three accounting firms to get his tax liability down to zero.

And when that time comes, rest assured we, the haves and the havests, will salute you, from the decks of our yachts parked in the harbors of Monte Carlo and Geneva, where they know how to create a tax shelter. And we will salute the great United States of China- er, we mean America, where government of the people, for the people and by the people, so long as the aforementioned people are rich as shit, shall not perish from the earth.

Sincerely,
The Rich