How to Stop Worrying and Love the Rich

It would seem to be a no-brainer that if the left believes that the rich should pay the lion’s share of taxes, as in fact they do, then they would similary agree that policy should support creating the greatest number of rich possible; that it would actually be a good thing if economic inequality were increasing? Wouldn’t it be better, hypothetically, if 10% of the people made over $1,000,000 a year and paid 60% of the total tax burden rather than having, say, 20% paying 50%? Clearly that would provide beau coup billions more revenue to the treasury.

When the country was founded, extremely minimal taxes never provided for taking care of individuals that slipped through the Republic's cracks. It took 150 years for our country to buy into the idea that it was government's job to take care of people. Taxes started going up dramatically as the burden of caring for the destitute and the aged poor became a shared value. Clearly in America we'll never allow these aforementioned groups to suffer so the problem should simply become - what’s the best way to practically fund their requisite additional assistance? More rich people paying more taxes creates more revenue to help the needy. Simple right?

The vast majority methinks would agree with this syllogism but for a pervasive mass perpetrated popular delusion; that if the rich have more then the rest of us as a result must have less. This is a truly one of the most dangerous economic myths and contributes mightily to decreased productivity, social unrest, resentment and class warfare. Now I'm only going to say this once so please pay attention. Just because Bill Gates has billions it doesn’t necessarily follow that any of us have one dime less. His billions didn’t come out of everyone else’s pockets. His wealth was created, not moved. It’s not a zero sum game. The pie got bigger. Capitalism is a wealth creating system. What? Your social studies teacher never told you that?

The truth is that the wealthy in the USA are paying the biggest share of total taxes in our history even at the Bush tax levels and it's entirely possible that if their rates were lowered that their share might actually increase. It's unarguable that since the early 80's when tax levels were reduced on high earners their share has increased. So if it costs us, the less than rich, nothing to have more millionaires, ( kindly review the previous paragraph ) it would incontrovertibly behoove us as a society to adopt policy that creates as many rich people as possible so they can pay an even greater share! Now is there a clinically sane person in the country that would make the argument that higher taxes on the rich will create more millionaires? You'd have to be an intellectual to believe such a thing...

But why stop with having them pay only for 40% of the tax burden*? If we have enough of them they can pay for everything! Imagine.. no taxes unless you make over 100K... or 200K! We should be teaching Napoleon Hill in the 3rd grade. Does Trump get invited to talk to grade schoolers and high school graduates? Imagine all the people... living off the rich. But as for me fellow Americans, I don’t care how many billionaires there are in this world as long as they’re paying for my health care and social security... and why not green's fees. Love them rich folks! Maybe we should stop denigrating them and start thanking them? They might work even harder.....

*The last government reported share of taxes paid by the top 5% of wage earners.

M.D.T

It Wasn't My Idea

It’s official. We’ve opened a new front in the War on Crazy Arabs in Libya to ‘protect civilians’ and ... ‘we’re not leading this’ according to S.O.S. Clinton. How ingenuous. At least have the guts to state clearly the reasons for getting involved. 'Protecting civilians'? Securing and stabilizing the oil markets and preventing a mass exodus of Islamic refugees to Europe rings truer for me somehow. How about you? If saving civilians were justifiable cause, we'd be fighting in a 100 countries. This deliberate obfuscation and disavowal of some credible and meaningful rational is insulting, demeaning and distasteful if not outright dangerous and unlawful. We appear, at this time, to be fighting in multiple theatres with no clear, guiding higher national purpose. At least Bush had the dignity and respect for our national heritage to frame our heroic adventures and misadventures alike under the idealistic maxim 'universal freedom and democracy for all'.

So if the Saudi princes were to violently suppress a democratic revolution would we attack them with cruise missiles and drones to save civilian lives? Apparently only if we don’t have to lead, there's no guiding higher ideological purpose and the U.N. says 'let's roll'. Ostensibly our latest, successive Democratic president's rationalizations have devolved from the encapsulating, edifying and inspiring maxim of “ I didn’t inhale” to “It wasn’t my idea”. Or does that depend on what your definition of my is? Just who's leading this whatever-you-want-to-call-it again?

Who hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword? What truth is marching on?

It's frightening and confusing to watch an administration with no moral tether to either America's bedrock founding principles nor to any discernable traditional religious value system wage noncommittal war under the banner of relativistic secular humanism. Even an infidel, methinks, would rather be led into battle by someone who believes in something strongly enough to die for it...

4/11/11 M.D.T.

Locophelia

Please. Someone tell me. Am I losing my mind, or did our President just propose a 53 billion dollar federal downpayment on new bullet trains to financial oblivion? Clearly Obama and his ilk must honestly believe that we're all playing some kind of game with play money. Trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see and we're going to build the new George Jetson Orient Express? How could this lefty locomotive leviathan end up being anything else but Amtrak on steroids? Subsidies and yet more subsidies. You don't have to be Edgar Cayce to forsee the thousands of environmental lawsuits, a whole new federal department of Choochanomics, cataclysmic cost over-runs, and endless delays. Maybe we should commission a dozen or so feasability studies to research if government is even capable of building anything of this magnitude? Could they even get through their own labyrinth of city, state, county and federal permits, environmental impact studies, union strikes and death and injury lawsuits ? Hell, we can't even rebuild Ground Zero in a decade. Bullet trains could take 100 years! But then again, maybe that's the whole idea. Bullet trains are just like government; they'll devour money at even greater speeds than ever before, create prevailing wage, politically correct jobs for new age John Henry's for untold decades, and never have to justify their existence on any pragmatic, fiduciary level, and of course provide unparalleled myriads of photo-ops for politicians nationwide. Government's become nothing more than a jobs program floating upon an influential minority's collective, delusionary, futuristic vision. At least Disneyland was built with private capital. If we can't cope with any of our real day to day problems, at least we can dream! Fiscal conservatives just aren't 'young at heart'.

I think the left's romantic obsession with trains mirrors their subsurface yearnings for a totally planned economy, a compulsory society where the 'trains run on time'. (Could Denzel Washington's new runaway train movie, Unstoppable, be a serendipitous, national subliminal metaphor for the runaway train as the American experiment gone out of control?) But it will take more than 30 years of Denzel's cinematic rail-yards practical experience, ingenuity and individual heroism to stop this latest 21st century socio-politico-enviromento-cultural bullet train to oblivion. It will require the leadership of a superhero of mythical proportions. Who was it again that was 'more powerful than a locomotive?'*

*Even if we find our Superman or Superwoman wasn't it green kryptonite that could kill them? Hope theyve saved some of Reagan and Thatcher's DNA for the first successful human clone. That's what I'd call a bonofide Sputnik moment.


George Will writing in Newsweek, Feb. 27:
Generations hence, when the river of time has worn this presidency's importance to a small, smooth pebble in the stream of history, people will still marvel that its defining trait was a mania for high-speed rail projects. This disorder illuminates the progressive mind. . . .
Forever seeking Archimedean levers for prying the world in directions they prefer, progressives say they embrace high-speed rail for many reasons—to improve the climate, increase competitiveness, enhance national security, reduce congestion, and rationalize land use. The length of the list of reasons, and the flimsiness of each, points to this conclusion: the real reason for progressives' passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans' individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.
To progressives, the best thing about railroads is that people riding them are not in automobiles, which are subversive of the deference on which progressivism depends. Automobiles go hither and yon, wherever and whenever the driver desires, without timetables. Automobiles encourage people to think they—unsupervised, untutored, and unscripted—are masters of their fates. The automobile encourages people in delusions of adequacy, which make them resistant to government by experts who know what choices people should make.
Time was, the progressive cry was "Workers of the world unite!" or "Power to the people!" Now it is less resonant: "All aboard!"

M.D.T.

Clobamitons

It’s curious and hopeful that the voters of a Democratically dominated Washington State recently voted down a state millionaire’s surtax this election; a tax publicly supported by none other than Bill Gates Jr. and Sr. and Warren Buffet, the world’s most notorious billionaires. If one had to choose the single defining ideological tenet of the modern left’s Clintonian/Obamanistan, (Clobamitan?) worldview, it would have to be… tax the rich; the puerile belief that the nation can punitively tax the well-to-do without greater adverse economic consequence; that taking money from those who save and invest and giving it to those who empty their checking account weekly actually has a more stimulating effect on the economy than leaving it in the hands of those who know how to make it in the first place.

But could it be in Washington state that the Clobamitons are finally actually making the connection that if you want someone to hire you it might be prudent not to raise their taxes? That they, the well heeled, might just take it personally that they have been singled out to pay more, as if they had somehow cheated or done something wrong? Could it be that they, the 1% that pay 40% of the nation’s taxes*, might just decide to hell with it and leave their state or the country? That they’re sick of the all-pervading populist perception that they somehow didn’t earn or deserve what they’ve created through their extraordinary effort, decision making, risk taking and vision? That they, those ersatz Gatsbians with modest fortunes, might just decide that the amount of money they’ve accumulated is enough and take their ball and go home? Could it be that it makes no practical sense to these Fox News devotees to continue to shoulder immense responsibilities only to keep less of what they’ve earned and to be publicly reviled by the political elites? Or that having more employees to worry about, to provide benefits for and to listen to their problems and excuses and to potentially sue them might not be really worth it just to drive a car that costs twice as much or live in a house that’s twice as big? Could it be these Bristol Palin voters might just think why in the hell should they work harder and longer and take on ever more responsibility and risk just so the extra tax dollars they pay can shore up some public employee’s union pension who retired at 53, send 34 warships to India or fund some new multimillion dollar study on the nondiscriminatory sexual habits of yeast? Could it be? Could it be? Naaagghh! When presented ultimately with the fiscal necessity of potentially giving up their beloved entitlements it will be so much easier to go on believing that the golden geese have metal hearts and that there’s no limit to their avarice, no matter what the social price.**

M.D.T.

*Newly released data from the IRS clearly debunks the conventional Beltway rhetoric that the "rich" are not paying their fair share of taxes.
Indeed, the IRS data shows that in 2007—the most recent data available—the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid 40.4 percent of the total income taxes collected by the federal government. This is the highest percentage in modern history. By contrast, the top 1 percent paid 24.8 percent of the income tax burden in 1987, the year following the 1986 tax reform act.
Remarkably, the share of the tax burden borne by the top 1 percent now exceeds the share paid by the bottom 95 percent of taxpayers combined. The Tax Foundation – Washington D.C.

** The owl of Minerva flies at dusk ( hopefully before the lights go completely out )

Wake Up Maggie

This time historical whimsy might be on our side. Bill Clinton walked serendipitously smack dab into the biggest technological bull market in world history and then retroactively claimed his policies and higher taxes on the rich triggered that economically beneficent time. Now, after two dark Decession years, the economy is poised for a rebound and with the return of the Republicans to power in the House and perhaps the Senate, the stupid party might similarly reap the rewards of that same whimsical historical mistress as the mere fact of their being elected and the predictable resulting modest restraints on spending get credit for the next recovery. The voters might, if we get real lucky, attribute the coming recovery, however anemic, to divided government and realize that, similarly, it was the Republican congress from 1994 'til 2000 juxtaposed with a Democratic president, and the resulting legislative gridlock then, that supplied the lack of magic ingredients for that prosperous period. But, it would clearly be too much to hope for, that the supermajority of voters will ever make the ultimate connection that gridlock is good because government can’t really do anything major to help the economy in the first place and the less they do, the better off economically we all are – that government tinkering and programs really have next to nothing to do with creating overall economic prosperity – that for every good thing they can impose or create, an equal or greater bad thing occurs – that succinctly, the government that governs least governs best.

Sadly, it may be that government and the deficit are just too damn big now for gridlock to work by itself and it will be necessary to roll back government spending in proportion to GNP for the mojo to escape from the the bottle; a daunting proposition. Government’s effete efforts to stimulate a recovery with Keynsian shovel-ready spending obviously can’t work with debt levels as high as they are. Every borrowed stimulus dollar clumsily spent is a dollar that will not only have to be repaid with more borrowed money but money, more than likely, borrowed at a higher interest rate. We’ll be paying more to refill the hole than it cost to dig the hole. Or to phrase that in Obamaspeak, 'It will cost more to refuel the bus with green gas than it cost to fill it.' Or, ‘You business folk gonna have to ride in the back of the bus now while we drive!’ But then again, they don’t teach at Harvard Law that in the real world the drivers of the economic recovery bus are those that know that a better way is, and has always been, a cheaper way... a more efficient way. Or, in Taylorspeak, 'If you want to drive the big bus daddy, you first better pass driver's ed at a vocational school* that doesn't get any government subsidies, vis a vis, the school of hard knocks, aka, the free market.'

*Where's our Margaret Thatcher? Wake up Maggie I think I got something to say to you. It's early November and time to send the demos back to school.

M.D.T.

Go Ask Alice

The net result of the present Keynsian stimulus and government bailouts is that instead of the companies, agencies and individuals that made poor economic decisions losing a few trillion, we get those whom rightfully should bear the financial burden cushioned from their just desserts and the economic consequences of their by-in-large self-afflicted fiscal malfeasance spread injudiciously throughout the public at large. **The size and cost of the total loss is magnified by a negative multiplier effect as the ramifications of the borrowed stimulus dollars' unintended consequences ripple through market after market and the total pain is dragged out over many years instead of just a few quarters. (Does anyone anywhere, for even a minute, expect high speed rail to break even or government subsidized battery factories to pay taxes?) Tragically, the vast majority of Americans in 2013 will never make the correlation between a hypothetical 8% unemployment rate instead of 6% or 2.1% GNP growth instead of 3.3% and the government's economic decisions that were made in 2008 and 2009. By then they will, in all likelihood, be blaming it on the new Republican president, the Chinese or the immigrant population.

The American Dream hasn’t been flushed down the toilet, just slowly bled and borrowed to death by an insulated minority that would protect us from ourselves at no consequence to themselves. And they dare to call themselves compassionate! How can there be any genuinely altruistic action where there is no self-sacrifice? Now, if the public sector would voluntarily take a 10% pay cut, retire at 65 like the rest of us and accept the same fringe benefit plans as the average private sector employee to voluntarily assist in the spurring of a real economic recovery, now that would be compassionate. But the public sector making sacrifices for the private sector?* An oxymoron. It's positively twisted that economically 98% of the sacrifice is made within the private sector but it is they who are excoriated as being greedy and selfish. Or did I miss somewhere the headlines about hundreds of thousands of government workers being laid off? So how did those who make the largest economic contributions and sacrifice to society get morally flip-flopped with the least productive? Go ask Alice. I think she'll know.

* The majority of them see their entire professional lives as one big sacrifice...
**When California goes bankrupt, the Golden State’s woes will be nationalized and shared with the nation at large. As with everything from mortgages to credit cards, so it goes for states: the feckless must have their pathologies rewarded and the prudent get stuck with the tab. Mark Stein


M.D.T.

Ass Whupper in Chief

Clearly Obama’s latest 'kick ass' comment reflects a deeply ingrained sentiment that business is always cutting corners to make a buck - that without the punitive hand of government's stiff regulations and fines, business would run amok endangering lives en masse. Far left Democrats like Obama think that the pockets of the private sector are infinitely deep and there's no limit to what discipline can be inflicted upon them. They’ll always be there to fleece and humiliate. The Golden Goose is immortal. ‘Kicking ass’ is a childish way of dealing with that which they, the liberal elite, can make no constructive contribution to. Hell we don't know how to drill oil, make cars, develop drugs, treat sick people; we don’t really fix anything... but we do know how to punish those productive members of society that try and don't meet our penumbrious utopian standards. If one child gets sick a year in the whole country from some flavored fruit punch confectioneer, the answer’s always more regulation and a generous portion from a fresh can of 'Whoop Ass'. We really ought to thank Obama for finally openly verbally distilling the primary function of government down into a crude colloquialism that is easy for everyone to understand. Guess that makes the President Ass Whupper in Chief!

The discipline of the marketplace is and has always been a proven effective ‘ass-whupper’ and the financial losses, legal ramifications and potentially bankrupting effects of malfeasance are more than adequate in maintaining a commercial moral order. Additional government threats and the introduction of individual criminality can potentially have severely deleterious effects on the necessary incentives required to maintain a healthy private sector.

The ubiquitous assault on business prevalent in our present sociopolitical climate, I fear, succeeds in significantly reducing the prestige and social allure for those seeking a successful business career thereby possibly deflecting the entrance of many talented and ambitious citizens from lifestyles dedicated to economic innovation. In a word, it could create a private sector brain drain. The lure of higher compensation in many cases might not be sufficient to overcome the psychological fear of being branded as a social pariah. Success and happiness for most people is the combination of earned personal wealth with the earned admiration and respect of one’s fellows. The dominance of ubiquitous leftist anti-business sentiment may at this point have unfortunately succeeded in making too many of America’s most significantly required business careers morally repugnant. “I’d like to introduce you to my son Marvin. He’s a very successful oil driller. I don’t know where we went wrong. We really tried to direct him into a more meaningful vocation like urban planning or the environmental sciences but, in truth, he always did like picking the wings off flies.”

In short, I fear we’ve finally arrived historically at a point where the most attractive career option for the vast majority of the best and the brightest is working for the government. Looking at the lifestyles and retirements of the bulk of our federal and state employees it’s, unfortunately getting pretty hard to argue against - plus you'll never get your chicken-shit non-presidential ass whupped....


M.D.T.