The Rich People We Hate Avoid a Tax Increase

Obama's Tax Raid on the Rich Only Impacts the Working Rich

(c) 2012 by Tom King

Did anyone notice that the only "rich" people that got a tax increase were the working wealthy - the ones that actually draw a paycheck or make a profit.

The already rich, the hereditary rich and those who have already made their pile (all of whom heavily support President Obama) didn't get any kind of meaningful tax increase because capital gains only went up 5% and manipulating and hiding capital gains earnings is really the easiest kind of income to avoid paying taxes on when you have teams of tax accountants and lawyers.

So Warren Buffet didn't get a tax increase even though he asked for one.  George Soros didn't get a tax increase even though he asked for one. The Kennedys, the Rockefellers, the Chases, the Morgans and the Astors didn't get a tax increase.  Most of the rich people who supported President Obama's campaign heavily didn't get a tax increase.

Oh, what a surprise!

I'm just sayin'

Tom

George Carlin is Wrong.

This got posted on Facebook the other day. (pause for you to read it).

I don't go to Facebook so much anymore because people put stuff up like this and it makes me mad and then I go off and waste time writing a huge long post about it which nobody hardly reads anyway.  I suppose it gives me a link to post I can use to respond to this junk instead of having to repeat myself endlessly.

George Carlin is wrong on this one.  This doesn't make sense to him because (1) he doesn't think of himself as "rich" even though next to me he was Warren Buffet and because (2) he thinks part of the money rich people make "belongs" to the government.  People like Carlin think of lowering taxes as "giving" rich people money (possibly because poor people don't pay taxes and so reducing taxes doesn't help them directly).  The whole thinking is flawed.

That's like a mugger giving you $5 change for the hundred dollar bill he took from you and expecting you to be grateful for the "gift".  It's not a gift, it's just $5 some criminal didn't take from you.  How is it we've come to think of the billions we take in taxes from some rich guys as "our" money and not money that belonged to those who earned it.

As to giving money to the poor, that's a noble thing to do.  We've done it for thousands of years.  The problem is that lately, we've made welfare a right.  I used to do counseling with troubled kids.  I'd ask them what they wanted to be when they grew up. One young man told me, "When I'm 21 I'm going to get my government check and then the women's will take care of me."  His family taught him that welfare was his right because he was poor. There was no thought that he should do anything other than to jump through the hoops to get his  government check.  Another man I talked to bragged about how many kids he had by how many different women and described how he managed to get money from government checks from most of them. He was proud of his proficiency at gaming the welfare system. There was no recognition that this was in any way wrong.

A welfare system that teaches people to believe this way is not doing what it was supposed to. It's merely a cash payout to the poor so we don't have to feel guilty about them or spend any time trying to really help them by giving them jobs or helping them get homes of their own.

People really do lose any incentive to work if you punish them for working by taking away what you were giving them for free if they do go to work.  It's a real problem that taking money from rich people won't help.

I worked for 30 years in the nonprofit sector and worked with all kinds of help systems.  I've been broke, I've been on food stamps and have to deal with Medicare.  I do know this. The welfare system as run by the government seems designed to prevent people from escaping its clutches. 

I think we should be honest about it though. If we're trying to create a permanent dependent class that will vote reliably Democratic, then just send them their checks and do away with all the paperwork and qualification process and all that pretense of wanting them to be better off.  Just let rich people pay into welfare like protection money to the Mafia only it's poor people they are afraid of.  If rich people give poor people all this money, then they sign a promise not to rise up and murder them in their expensive beds.

Something is deeply wrong with the system.  I've seen it.  All the rhetoric about punishing the rich by taxing them is only obscuring the problem. The same politicians who tell you they want to tax the rich to help the poor, don't want you to think about why those same politicians are getting millions of dollars in campaign contributions from those same rich people.  They don't want you to look too closely and make the connection that those corporate bailouts and huge bonuses to CEOs that wreck their companies are all being funded by middle class taxpayers - the working rich who run the companies, own the businesses and hire the workers in this country. The giant fat cat corporations give lip service to liberal ideals because they know they can buy their way around having to pay those taxes.  They've been doing it for decades. When the top tax rate was 76% back in the 60s, it was only the working rich that paid such confiscatory taxes. The giant companies and the super-rich paid virtually nothing but attorney fees. 

Who do you think puts tax loopholes for the super rich  in the tax laws?  It's not the middle class, that's for sure.  It's career politicians and the Democrats have historically been the worst offenders, though there have been plenty of Republicans willing to sell their souls for a senate seat.

I just hate to see so many people taken in by the ideological shell game. In the end it will be politicians and the super rich in their fancy houses like the dachas of the Soviet Union's apparatchik, while the rest of us enjoy the uniform misery that is being one of "the people" in a socialist nation.

I've never understood why anyone who has ever read a history text can truly believe that the way to freedom is to create a bigger, more intrusive government.  It never ever works.......NEVER.

(c) 2012 by Tom King

Free Your Mind and Think...

 (c) 2011 by Tom King

 Saw this little gem (right) posted on the Internet. The author should take his own advice to FREE YOUR MIND AND THINK.

Mr. Lester demonstrates a profound lack of understanding as to what money really is and how it works.  Mr. Lester (I'm not sure what the "B" stands for, but here, I think I'll call him, Bob) seems to think money is like cats or old newspapers - something we collect that has little or no purpose once we've hoarded it up. If we keep control of large amounts of money, old Bob assumes we keep others from having any. Bob apparently subscribes to the idea that money and economics is a zero-sum game. Either that, or I suspect Mr. Lester's been watching "Hoarders" on TV, looked around his apartment, felt threatened and needed someone else to identify as a hoarder to take the heat off his own conscience.

Actually, wealthy people, by and large (and with the possible exception of Scrooge McDuck), do use their money - spreading it around, if you will. They buy goods and services, they build businesses that hire people, they lend their money to cities in the form of municipal bonds so our cities can spread the wealth they don't have and keep your streets clear and repaired, your sewers and water pipes working. They buy shares in companies that allow those companies to hire employees to make goods and sell them to us in places like Wal-Mart. Their money builds stores where we buy food. Their money is lent to states and counties (bonds again) so they can build bus lines, airports and rail transit. They pay virtually all of the taxes in this country. More than half of us pay no income tax at all. Bob imagines that wealthy people have these big giant buildings in their backyards, like Scrooge McDuck, where they go and swim in their cash once in a while.

It isn't so.  Bill Gates is fabulously wealth, true. He's becoming a bit of a megalomaniac in his attempts to use his money to meddle in the culture. But at the same time, his enterprises support the state of Washington's welfare programs practically all by themselves through the property and sales taxes Microsoft pays. If Microsoft's, Amazon's and Boeing's owners gave away all their money, as Bob suggests, their companies would soon shut down. They would stop making money and employing people and pretty soon all the money they gave away would be used up and Washington would have to stop feeding the poor, running transit lines and homeless shelters.  State health care and all the state-run liquor stores would have to shut down because they would no longer be subsidized by taxpayers like Boeing, Amazon and Microsoft. Poverty, like some kind of economic vampire, drains the economy of resources with precious little return. The free market economy depends on its members exchanging their labors, their work for food, clothing, shelter, utilities and recreational opportunities. If we build up a huge class of folks who do nothing for those things, the whole thing will one day collapse. We should, of course, help the poor and there ARE those who can give little back in the way of work, although, you'd be surprised how much even the disabled and homeless could give back. I worked in vocational rehab for years and in a pinch, most people can find something to do to help earn their keep, even in a small way.

Good cow, people. Money is not like cats.  If you hoard cats, you have to feed them, take them to the vet and clean up their crappy litter boxes. A cat never hired anyone, never started a company, nor built a road. They consume, producing only good feelings and a lot of soiled kitty litter for the cat owner.  Money is most useless when it is sitting in a vault. Most money is imaginary anyway - just numbers in a computer that tells you how much money you would have if there were actually that many greenbacks in their vault and not just in their computers. Scrooge McDuck is a cartoon. He's not a real billionaire, though many of our Marxist friends firmly believe that he is.

If everybody tried to turn everything of value into cash so they could swim in their money, the U.S. treasury would be up printing hundred dollar bills nonstop, 24 hours a day for months and months and months to create the piles o' cash Bob imagines are sitting around awaiting redistribution. Money has value because it works. Even sitting in a savings account, your money helps me buy my house because it is used to fund my mortgage. I pay it back with interest. If you check it out of the bank so you can take a swim, you don't earn interest and that's all a savings is good for anyway. That and I don't get to build my house, the carpenters have lost their jobs and so on and so on.

There's a serious flaw in Mr. Lester's logic.

I'm just sayin'

Tom King