It was one of Huey Long’s favorite slogans. At the height of the Depression with one-third of America unemployed, bankruptcies and foreclosures through the roof, stockbrokers committing suicide and credit paralyzed, the Dictator of Louisiana advocated his Share Our Wealth program to provide a basic level of financial security for every American family. The program would have worked like this:
- Every American family would receive a one-time grant of $5000
--2007 dollars: $76,682.62
-Every American family would receive an annual subsidy from the Federal government of $2000 - $3000
--2007 dollars: $30,673.05 - $46,009.57
-Education, from kindergarten through a bachelor’s degree, would be free
-Senior citizens, veterans and farmers would be subsidized
-The work week would be reduced from forty hours to thirty
To pay for these benefits, personal fortunes would be taxed at the following rates by the Federal government:
The first $1 million of net wealth 0%
The second $1 million 1%
The third $1 million 2%
The fourth $1 million 4%
The fifth $1 million 8%
The sixth $1 million 16%
The seventh $1 million 32%
The eighth $1 million 64%
- All private assets above $8 million would be confiscated
- All annual incomes of $1 million or more would be taxed at 100%
This meant that someone with $9 million in total net assets would have 25.2% of their wealth seized by the Federal government, and someone with $100 million in total net assets would lose 93.27% of those assets. The richer the individual, the more he would lose.
Share Our Wealth and its most vocal exponent were wildly popular among the poor and helped bolster the Kingfish’s chances for the Presidency in 1936, given that so many people were suffering and that so many felt that even President Roosevelt’s radical reforms didn’t go far enough to resolve the country’s most serious economic crisis. It was Long’s view that too much of the nation’s wealth was concentrated in the hands of too few selfish millionaires, industrialists and speculators, and the only way to relieve the nation’s agony was to impose draconian measures. An assassin’s bullet ended Huey Long’s life before he could challenge for the White House but the populist agenda he championed has been echoed through the decades by such luminaries as Lyndon Johnson, George McGovern, Jesse Jackson, Al Gore, Al Sharpton, Tom Harkin and now Barack Obama.
It sounds simple enough. Someone has more money than they need, someone else doesn’t have enough. The government takes the surplus and divides it more evenly. What could be easier? No-one advocates for poverty, right? How could anyone oppose a “fairer” distribution of wealth? But has been demonstrated wherever socialism has been tried, this approach has very limited benefits and very extensive costs. First, the very definitions of “surplus,” “too much,” and “not enough” are relative – how much is “too much” and how much is “not enough”? Second, stiff taxes punish success and reward poverty. Why work harder if your efforts result in someone else taking the profit? Third, as successful people and companies lose their assets and their willingness to take risks (and to profit from those risks), the surplus shrinks until it disappears and the redistribution of wealth becomes the redistribution of poverty. The vast social welfare programs that are the vehicles of redistribution struggle, the families grown dependent on those programs struggle, and the government faces a difficult choice of either slashing the programs it created or increasing taxes again to maintain the level of spending, which only deepens the crisis. These three points form the conservative opposition to redistributionist policies.
So given the volumes of data proving the failure of “soak the rich” schemes, why would Senator Obama endorse another one? Why increase taxes at the very time that the markets need more private capital, not less? For two reasons: The forementioned popularity of such schemes among low wage earners who want someone else to pay for benefits they cannot afford themselves; and a fundamental belief that government should decide how to spend money, not the people who earned it - socialism. Although the liberal elite enjoy the rewards of capitalism (George Soros, Ted Turner, the Kennedys, Nancy Pelosi, Bill and Hillary Clinton and certainly the Obamas themselves), they want to force everyone else to share the mediocrity of socialism, an hypocrisy that never seems to dawn upon them. They see capitalism as inherently unfair because of its emphasis on opportunity and not results, and seek to reverse that unfairness through confiscatory taxes and lavish government spending. Anyone who objects to higher taxes is considered selfish, hence the Obama campaign’s indignant response to “Joe the Plumber’s” simple question about the Senator’s tax policy. An average, middle-class, blue-collar worker, a person that Senator Obama claims to represent, dares to confront him directly about his plan and the liberal smear machine tries to destroy him. This obsession with uniformity, this aversion to excellence characterizes the liberal position on a variety of issues, from taxes to health care, from housing to education, from unions to transportation, from agriculture to energy, from the environment to foreign policy, though not morals: Abortion, homosexuality, drugs and pornography are powerful gods in the liberal pantheon. They prefer the security of sameness to the chance to achieve, an attitude that is regrettable in an individual but catastrophic to a society. This attitude we must resist at all hazards, and though the Kingfish did not deserve to be murdered, his socialist dream – now Senator Obama’s – must be administered the coup de grace.
Source: http://www.westegg.com/inflation/
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