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Real Answers™
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Copyright: © 2011 Tom Flannery
835 words

TAXING THE RICH HURTS THE POOR

By: Tom Flannery

The debt-ceiling deal hasn’t appeased liberals, either those in Washington or those outside of government, who continue calling for more massive spending, huge tax hikes, and an ever-expanding big government behemoth to pay for so-called “entitlements.”

This is socialism, pure and simple — the redistribution of wealth.  The problem with socialism, as Margaret Thatcher once brilliantly remarked, is that eventually you run out of other peoples’ money.  Still, that doesn’t stop the true believers from taking any opportunity they can to try it one more time.  And their rallying cry is always rooted in class warfare.

“Tax the rich!”  they say, although it’s always those who are far less than rich who end up paying.  

These days, the “rich” are defined as couples who make $250,000 a year — roughly what two professional working people would earn annually.  Now, if that couple has two kids, a mortgage and car payments, health care costs and all the rest, by what means are they categorized as being rich?  It’s absolutely ludicrous!

Moreover, even if we confiscated every dime from every millionaire and billionaire in the country, it wouldn’t come anywhere close to addressing our debt crisis.  And the class warfare crowd knows this (they just don’t want to admit it publicly).  That’s because we don’t have a revenue problem;  we have a spending problem.

Worse yet, taxing the rich always ends up hurting everyday working people and the overall economy.  Although socialists use that term “the rich” as a pejorative, the people they are talking about are business owners, job creators and investors.  Simply put, the more of their money that the government takes away, the less they invest into the economy, the fewer jobs they create or continue to carry, and the less risk they take with their money in starting new enterprises or keeping current businesses going.

Yet the socialist’s ultimate goal of redistribution relies on class warfare, so they stick with it.  The strategy is always based on two provable lies:  one, the rich aren’t paying “their fair share” and, two, that taxing them at higher rates will generate greater revenue for the government.

As for the first of these fallacies, the top 1% of U.S. wage earners pay 38% of the income taxes (compared to 19% in 1980).  Furthermore, the top 3% pay more than the remaining 97%, and the lower 50% pay no income taxes at all.

So what are they talking about?

Secondly, higher tax rates on the rich will often result in lower revenue, and vice versa.  Since wealthy people have far more financial freedom than everyone else, especially today in this global economy, it’s relatively easy for them to avoid punitive tax rates — through tax shelters, overseas investments, and so on.  So, again, the ones who end up getting hurt are the working people (the same ones that the socialists claim to represent).    

Socialism is a fiscally ruinous route, for it strikes against the biblical precepts upon which this nation began.  Whereas James Madison said our country was founded upon the 10 Commandments, and the consent of the citizenry to willingly follow them, that is no longer the case.  Not since the Supreme Court ruled starting in the 1960s that the 10 Commandments, along with prayer and Bible reading, had to be removed from our schools.

It shouldn’t have come as a shock, therefore, that our liberal (socialist) elites replaced the “old, antiquated” political system with one which is based on breaking those commandments — by being covetous (those who are poor, or just not as well-off as others, want what they view as “their piece of the pie,” even at the expense of others), by stealing (taking money from one group of people to give it to another group, not at gunpoint but by government fiat), by legalizing murder (abortion), and so on.

We even conveniently did away with the whole concept of sin in our culture.  However, this didn’t mean that either sin, or its horrendous consequences, ceased to exist simply because we wanted them to or thought that they should.

“Righteousness exalts a nation,” the Bible tells us in Proverbs 14:34, “but sin is a reproach to any people.”

So as much as some would like to set aside “social issues” to focus exclusively on our debt crisis and overall economic mess, the fact of the matter is that the two are inextricably linked.  They are inseparable.

For instance, take abortion.  Because of legalized abortion, we don’t have the population to support the impending retirement of tens of millions of Baby Boomers (the abortion generation).

You see, our economic problems are at heart a moral issue.  As one theologian observed:  “Many people living at the bottom of American society have cell phones, flat-screen TVs, and some of the other goodies of consumer culture.  But their lives are a mess.”

Until we confront this fact, we’ll never be able to deal with our debt or overall economic decline.

"Real Answers™" furnished courtesy of The Amy Foundation Internet Syndicate. To contact the author or The Amy Foundation, write or E-mail to: P. O. Box 16091, Lansing, MI 48901-6091; amyfoundtn@aol.com

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