Got your attention, didn’t I? Has Dave lost his mind? Has he done a complete 180 and now sides with the leftys and the unions? Relax. While I do think the rich should pay their fair share, I also believe anything close to fair would be a lot less than they are paying now, considering that currently the rich, and especially the very rich, are paying the great majority of taxes while using the same amount of services as those who pay little or no taxes.
First the philosophical:
The wealth of the rich is not a natural resource to be mined like a vein of copper in the side of a mountain. For the great majority of wealthy people, the wealth they have was created by them. It did not exist before they created it. So if those wealthy people never existed neither would the wealth they created. It didn’t just fall from the sky for them to grab before others could. Notable exceptions are those rich people who get their wealth through the use of criminal force such as the mafia, or by (also criminal) government force like G.E.’s “green” subsidies or Goldman Sachs’ money laundering operations for the counterfeiters at the Federal Reserve. I don’t include among these exceptions those who inherited their wealth because the original creators of that wealth wanted them to have it and no force was involved in them getting it.
If someone does all the right things it takes to get rich, such as studying hard in school, working really hard, saving their money instead of spending it and then risking that money by investing it, why should someone who didn’t do all those things have a right to share in his or her success? When the taxers say the rich need to “give back” to the country that did so much for them, they have it backwards. The rich are the ones that are doing so much for us. Just about everything in life that we need and enjoy, from cell phones to pizza to CT scans comes from rich people, not the government. Most importantly, most of the jobs in the country exist because someone figured out a way to combine human labor and capital investment in a manner that produces wealth not just for themselves, but for their customers and employees. They should be rewarded, not punished. In this country, with all the paperwork and regulations to overcome, the rich don’t get rich because of the government (see exceptions above), in most cases they get rich despite of it.
And now the practical:
First of all it’s a big mistake for government to hitch it’s carriage to the incomes of the rich. It is the incomes of the rich that drop the most during economic recessions. When the government is getting over half of it’s income taxes from the top few percent of earners we see precipitous drops in revenues during hard times. The incomes of the rich are too unstable to depend on for government budgeting.
Secondly, the rich can move to another state, or apportion their time so they can be officially a resident of another state. When Maryland introduced a millionaires tax, the next year they had something like 30% fewer millionaires. Tax collected from millionaires actually went down. And punitive taxes on the most productive of us discourages these people from setting up shop in the state to begin with. Not only do we get no taxes at all from them, but we miss out on participating in whatever productive enterprise is making them rich. No rich people means no jobs for the rest of us. And other states’ overtaxing of wealthy people indirectly hurts us because whatever capital is taken from rich people by the government is removed from the productive sector of the national economy and is no longer available to be used to grow that economy and create jobs. Much of it also might otherwise go to charity. The taxers like to pretend that if they didn’t take that money it would be buried in a shoebox in a rich person’s backyard.
Finally I would like to point out that if you overtax the rich they won’t bother working so hard. Many doctors and others in the healthcare industry are contemplating early retirement rather than dealing with Obamacare. Why go through all the hard work and risk if the government is going to be the main beneficiary?
When politicians like Obama say that tax cuts for the rich “costs” the government money, it means that they think all the money that we create belongs to them and it’s up to them to decide how much of it we “need”. By what right do they get first dibs on our money? Who do these people think they are? And Who is John Galt?
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