Did I somehow enter Bizarro world? Am I in some kind of medically induced coma? Did I fall down a rabbit hole? Is the New York Times actually saying that Obama’s plan to tax only the rich is unrealistic and will not work?
Yep, apparently they are.
Behind Democrats’ struggle to pay the $1 trillion 10-year cost of President Obama’s
promise to overhaul the health care system is their collision with
another of his well-known pledges: that 95 percent of Americans “will
not see their taxes increase by a single dime” during his term.
This will not be the last time that the president runs into a
conflict between his audacious agenda and his pay-as-you-go guarantee,
when only 5 percent of taxpayers are being asked to chip in. Critics
from conservative to liberal warn that Mr. Obama has tied his and
Congress’s hands on a range of issues, including tax reform and the
need to reduce deficits topping $1 trillion a year.
Now, I want to put aside for a moment the idea that taxing the most productive, hardest working members of society is somehow moral. It’s not. It’s penalizing achievement and hard work, and it’s a morally repugnant principle.
But Obama’s promise to tax “the rich” to pay for every boneheaded social welfare program he and his socialist posse in Congress brew up in the dark of night will leave no “rich” left to abuse in a very short time. Someone has to pay at some point, and taxing the rich into poverty will leave only us – the middle class – as the new “rich.” It will reduce production (after all, who wants to work hard, achieve and succeed if they know that the government will only appropriate everything they think is extraneous profit and redistribute it to others?).
So who will be left to pay?
Mr. Obama’s vow to tax only the rich is a variation “of Bush’s
policy that nobody has to pay for anything,” said Leonard Burman, a
veteran of the Clinton administration Treasury and director of the
nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.“Democrats are more worried about
the deficits,” Mr. Burman added, but “they put the burden on a tiny
fraction of the population that they figure doesn’t vote for them
anyway.”Mr. Burman and others recall that in the creation of
Social Security and Medicare, Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and
Lyndon B. Johnson insisted that beneficiaries contribute through
payroll taxes, both to finance the programs and to give all Americans a
vested interest. The same philosophy should apply to seeking universal
health coverage, they say.“This idea that everything new that
government provides ought to be paid for by the top 5 percent, that’s a
basically unstable way of governing,” Mr. Burman said.
Whoa! Did a Democrat, and a former Clinton Administration Treasury staffer just say that???
Will the current administration listen?
Don’t bet on it.
Aug 02, 2009 @ 21:50:05
“The rich” has always meant the middle class when Democrats say it. The real rich are protected by tax loopholes, their connections, their ability to hedge their investments, etc.As a great example, what truly rich person is ever impacted by race or gender preferences? Their connections protect them and their children. And their ability to buy a good education allows them to sit back and watch middle class kids get trumped out of their opportunities without any loss of their own.Large corporations can do better sometimes when new regulations or taxes are imposed, because it reduces the opportunities of less established competitors.And of course, there is lavish corporate welfare. It’s just disguised as something “socially beneficial”.The real rich never get hurt. It is always the middle class who pay.