George Rebane
According to the progressive worldview, you will work just as hard and take just as much risk when the government takes 80% of your earnings as you will when the government takes only 30% of those same earnings. That simple proposition is the left’s basis for funding any additional revenues they deem government to need. Just raise tax rates until the numbers come out as required by your spending programs.
And it isn’t only the sheeple in their ranks that fervently believe this. It is also a phalanx of credentialed economists (some Nobelists included) and behavioral sociologists.
That the historical data does not support this conclusion is ignored by the apologists who see all fiscal problems solved by simply raising taxes. Most people will instinctively understand the insanity of such a belief, at least when they put themselves into the earner’s shoes. ‘Why should I work just as hard for the dollar from which the government will let me keep twenty cents, than I do for the same dollar from which I got to keep seventy cents? I think I’ll just take some extra time off and figure out where to put my energies so I can keep more of what I earn.’
And that such thoughts are beyond rocket science to the collectivist is borne out by their constant surprise of why government revenues fall when tax rates approach confiscatory levels. Yet, as we can see today, their tax hike solution is in stasis, trotted out every time the debt burdens and unfunded liabilities of governments are discussed. ‘We’ll just tax the rich, they’re so stupid that they won’t notice, and we’ll get all that extra money that they will continue earning no matter what we do.’
Stephen Moore in the 28may11 WSJ presents an analysis showing how the Obama administration expects to solve our fiscal problems by raising total tax rates above 60% in the near term, with the expectation of returning to even higher rates later. Their assurance to the rest of us is ‘Don’t worry, the rich can afford it and they will pay it.’
Elsewhere we have been shown that if the rich really are that stupid and keep their earnings constant, AND the government takes ALL their earnings, it still won’t amount to a hill of beans as far as the real cuts we have to make in our entitlements payouts.
But the liberal mind is beyond conversion when it comes to looking at the world as a neat collection of little boxes of human activity, each isolated from the others, what you do to one of them affects only that specific activity. Most people gave up that kind of thinking at a very young age and started seeing the linkages between almost everything that humans plan and do. The fundamental paradigm that captures this reality is, ‘You can’t do just one thing.’
But liberal control of education teaches kids exactly the opposite in the affairs of man. In those schools it is only natural things, like the environment, in which linkages exist. And these linkages are only the politically mandated ones. A tax-based example of this, which government monopoly schools have embedded in little formative minds, is the wholesale ignorance that state workers and corporations really pay taxes. The little darlings grow up believing it until life’s last breath, and go to their reward never knowing that corporate taxes are just another sleight of government’s hand in their own wallets.
What’s more, it is real easy to get these good hearted folks to support raising taxes on greedy corporations, else it just adds to the filthy lucre of corporate profits, which, as we all know, is a pretty seamy reason to conduct business.
rebanesruminations.com 
Leave a comment