LEGAL LARCENY
It’s generally accepted that until consumer incomes turn up and their spending increases the economy will remain stagnant. However, the government’s high tax rates have placed an enormous roadblock in the way of economic growth. Any fool should know that punishing highly productive entrepreneurs with rising taxes will inhibit the creation of new jobs. The government cannot create jobs the way that the private sector can. By taking so much in taxes the government becomes a job killer.
In my state, almost 55% of a successful person’s income goes for taxes. The economy can never get traction with these exorbitant tax rates. As we have witnessed for the past five years. The economist Murray Rothbard explained “Soaking the rich would not only be profoundly immoral, it would drastically penalize the very virtues: thrift, business foresight, and investment that have brought about our remarkable standard of living. It would truly be killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.”
A lot of negative attention has been focused on the wealthiest 1% recently. Despite the fact that they pay almost 40% of the taxes the left has set out to demonize them. Writing in 1980 George Gilder tells us, “Hatred of producers of wealth still flourishes and has become the racism of the intelligentsia.”
Recently the Minneapolis Tribune ran an insulting cartoon on the editorial page that depicted the 1% as stealing from the middle class. Sad to say this is what the majority of Americans believe. Liberal politicians love to point to hedge fund managers and Wall Street bankers like Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan as representative of the wealthiest 1%. The columnist, Thomas Sowell, puts the 1% in perspective, “Most of the people in the upper income brackets are not rich and do not have wealth sheltered offshore. They are typically working people who have finally reached their peak earning years after many years of far more modest incomes – and now see much of what they have worked for siphoned off by politicians, to the accompaniment of lofty rhetoric.”
It’s disgusting to have to defend the high incomes of those who are most successful providing products and services. High incomes come from profits that come from serving the public. Business people create wealth, pay most of the taxes and give generously to charities and worthwhile causes. Envy from the left is making this prosperity more difficult to achieve.
