LOOK WHO’S HIDING
A recent article in the Sarasota newspaper advised that the Internal Revenue Service was aggressively hiring new people to become tax auditors. No doubt the current administration will beef up the IRS to extract the last dime possible from those who work and invest. It’s either tax, borrow or print. Eventually, they’ll jack up the tax rate on the big earners who already pay half the taxes. They would have to raise taxes to over 95% in order to pay for current government spending, and they would still be short.
State and local governments also need a lot more money. They will be fervently seeking more funds through sales tax and state income tax audits. Governments everywhere will be inventing new taxes and increasing old taxes. The idea that low taxes revive and stimulate the economy has gone out the window. Bureaucrats hate the idea of anyone making a lot of money. They think it belongs to the government. They envy the rich and it shows.
That’s why taxes aren’t used as an incentive for resolving our economic problems. It’s too bad. Here’s what could be done. Any investor or homeowner who buys a house in the next two years wouldn’t have to pay any taxes on the gain. Any person or corporation investing in oil and gas drilling this year and next would pay no taxes on the resulting revenue for five years. Presto-chango!
It won’t happen. The one thing the left fears above all else is that somebody’s going to make a profit. For them profit is a dirty word. They have convinced themselves that the wealth of the rich has contributed to the poverty of the poor. They ignore the fact that living standards are highest in countries with the greatest number of wealthy entrepreneurs.
Profits are created by those who best serve the consumer. Profits lead to more and better production. The left wants higher taxes on profits and endorses policies that discourage or eliminate profits altogether. Every step in this direction contributes to the ongoing disintegration of our society. If this trend persists, make no mistake about it, we are going to hit the gutter.
THE VOICE OF EXPERIENCE
Paul Mladjenovic wrote the following in his newsletter: “My family and I escaped communist Yugoslavia in 1963. For the uninitiated, communism is the full, 100%, iron-handed application of socialism. In other words, heavy-handed government bureaucracy runs 100% of the economy. Actually, the more complete thought is that government bureaucracy runs 100% of the economy into the ground. Socialism is history’s more enduring and most destructive scam; it emanates from the Karl Marx School of economics. Karl Marx easily wins history’s award as the greatest and most dangerous economic crackpot (on economics, Groucho knows more than Karl). Anyway, the only things that socialism produces in abundance are poverty and oppression. We came to America and my parents were part of the ‘working poor’ but we were vastly better off (thank God!).
“Yugoslavia tried to jumpstart its woeful economy by turning to a Keynesian ‘solution’. In 1989, Yugoslavia enacted its ‘stimulus plan’; it went on a government spending binge. If the country was wallowing in economic squalor, where did the money come from? Simple….it was created out of thin air! In other words…INFLATION. It merely printed up the money and flooded the struggling economy with ‘spending’. That was the final nail in the coffin for my former homeland. The ‘stimulus plan’ brought on hyperinflation and Yugoslavia collapsed amid economic and social disintegration. By 1994, Yugoslavia was no more. New sovereign nations arose from the rubble (such as Croatia where I was born). The ruling elite in the former Yugoslavia thought (wrongly) that prosperity and wealth could be created or stimulated by simply using government force and a printing press. How wrong they were!”
