‘It’s mine, I spend it’: guessing the rapper’s thoughts about Obama’s fiscal cliff

The most stylish fellow passenger in Delta Air Lines’ business class cabin from Atlanta to Heathrow last week was a chap in shades and a hoodie with a couple of kilos of bling round his neck. Inquiries in the galley identified him as ‘2 Chainz’, a Georgia-born rapper whose real name is Tauheed Epps. I gathered he had invited the flight crew to call him Tad — and naturally I was keen to befriend him myself, but the Dracula’s-coffin configuration of Delta’s flatbeds made conversation all but impossible. So I was left trying to guess his thoughts on the issue of the ‘fiscal cliff’.

That is the impending crisis in which the expiry of George W. Bush’s tax cuts, combined with a federal spending squeeze also scheduled for January, will cause a sudden $600 billion shrinkage of the budget deficit that threatens to plunge the US economy, and possibly ours with it, straight back into recession unless compromise is reached to soften the impact. Any self-respecting hip-hop artist is, of course, highly likely to have voted for Barack Obama (93 per cent of African-Americans did so) but Mr Epps’s holding of portable precious metal and decision to seek his fortune abroad — in his UK debut at the Electric Brixton alongside DJ Semtex, in case you missed it — suggest a pessimistic view of domestic economic prospects under the re-elected president. Judging by hislyrics (‘It’s mine, I spend it’), he’s also no supporter of tax hikes for higher earners.

These opinions would align him with much of America’s middle class, who wait to see whether Obama will be any more potent in his second term than he was in his first when it comes to arm-wrestling Congressional Republicans such as House Speaker John Boehner. The argument is chiefly about symbolic tax rates and power struggles between the White House and Capitol Hill, much less about spending cuts or ‘sequestration’ — which if all happens as planned, will be broad, shallow and not in protected areas such as federal pensions and veterans’ benefits.