Barack Obama’s latest rhetorical and policy prescription assaults on Americans who make money are his alleged “jobs” and “deficit reduction” plans.
In which the President calls for nearly half a trillion dollars in new taxes – under the oh-so-tired guise of making the “rich” “pay their fair share.”
(Someone needs to introduce these people to Reality. Here in Reality, life isn’t fair. The sooner they realize this – and stop trying to use government to make it so – the better off we all will be.)
The American people are overwhelmingly underwhelmed by the President’s latest bit of Leftism. (Not to mention many Congressional Democrats.) I wonder why?
Perhaps it’s the fact that the federal government has increased its per annum spending by 29% in just the last four years – from $2.73 trillion to $3.82 trillion.
During the depths of the Great Recession – when the private sector was least equipped to shoulder the gigantic new burden.
And that a return to 2007 spending levels would negate most of our deficit problem, and begin to work dramatically on our debt problem – without raising taxes a cent.
Perhaps it’s the fact that the federal government wastes gobs and gobs and gobs of money.
Solyndra’s half a billion dollars squandered – which the Administration knowingly threw down a soon-to-be-bankrupt Crony Socialist rathole – is just the tip of a Titanic-sized iceberg.
For instance, we dedicated more than $60 billion of the 2009 $867 billion alleged “stimulus” to “green jobs.” But Newsweek at the time reported:
The working definition (of green “job”) paints a broad stroke….But..leaves lots open to interpretation…making it difficult, if not impossible, to measure whether eco-based jobs are being created and whether, as the administration has claimed, they’re the saviors of a sagging economy.
No kidding.
As Solyndra yet again reminds us, the federal government was not designed to be a venture capital firm. Because they have for one hundred-plus years proven utterly incapable of identifying good ways to “invest” (read: spend) our money. In a pathetic attempt to create (or save?) jobs – or for any other reason.
We the People see the government taking and wasting more money than ever before – and are thusly less than enthusiastically receptive to President Obama’s call for anyone to fork over any more coin.
Especially when we know that there simply aren’t anywhere near enough “rich” people to tax our way out of this spending-induced mess.
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And as for making the “rich” “pay their fair share” – if the rich are to start doing so, they are due for a huge tax cut.
The Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution affords us equal protection before the law. Meaning we are all to be treated equally by the law.
Yet we have a progressive income tax – where different people have the law applied to them differently depending upon how much money they make. This is ridiculous, in addition to being unconstitutional.
The top current rate is 35% – and President Obama calls for an increase to 39.6%. (Either percentage is an obscene theft, but let us move on.) There are five additional, lesser, tiered rates – again, descending as one’s income decreases.
Equal treatment by the law? Hardly.
And it gets vastly more absurd when one examines the percentage of the total tax take the “rich” pay.
The wealthiest 1% of the population earns 19% of the income but pays 37% of the income tax. The top 10% of earners pay 68% of the tab.
Meanwhile, the bottom 50%…now earn 13% of the income but pay just 3% of the taxes…. (S)ome 45% of American income earners paid no income tax at all in 2010.
President Obama calls for this overwhelmingly imbalanced ratio to be – made even more overwhelmingly imbalanced.
And President Obama makes yet another error.
Letting people and companies (read: employers) keep their own money is NOT the same thing as giving some people other people’s money.
Yet the President incessantly conflates the two.
President Obama’s proposal to place a harsh cap on the itemized deductions of businesses – i.e. reducing the amount of their own money that they can keep – is not the same thing as writing them a government check.
There is certainly a tax reform argument to be made here. We need much lower (and much fewer) corporate and personal tax rates, without the Pandora’s box of special breaks and deductions.
But to say that a business offset to lower their tax liability is the same thing as a government check being cut to someone is patently absurd.
We’ve earned our coin, and we want – and deserve – to keep a whole lot more of it then we are currently allowed under our confiscatory and labyrinthine tax code.
Only through the Picasso-esque Huge Government worldview – where all money is government’s, and any kept by those who earned it is “lost revenue” – does this not make sense.
We the People aren’t buying it. As demonstrated by our utter lack of faith in President Obama’s “jobs” and “deficit reduction” plans. As demonstrated by the 2010 election.
As will again be demonstrated in November of next year.