One reason behind liberals’ psychosis for higher taxes
and spending is the persistent gap between
very prosperous and
not-very-prosperous people. Driven,
objective-oriented, enterprising people always seem to find new ways to make
money while others seldom do, in spite of the heavy taxes levied on those
entrepreneurs and the generous subsidies lavished on the middle class and the
poor. This should illustrate simple
human nature and the futility of the Big Government paradigm but for the Left,
it stokes frustration and anger, frustration that higher taxes don’t stop rich
people from getting rich and anger that they would dare to do so. Don’t they know that a classless society
would be best for everyone? If everyone shared the same staid, mediocre
standard of living with nobody being super-rich and nobody being super-poor,
then class envy would cease and a new era of human life would begin, and though
this dream has mesmerized liberals for 100 years, it ignores basic human
nature. If I have no incentive to excel,
to invent new things or start a new business or take any kind of risk, then
I’ll sit on my hands and wait for my welfare check like everyone else;
conversely, if I lack the intelligence or the training or the special skills or
drive to excel and I’m one of the people who depend on risk-takers for my
welfare check, then I’m in a very precarious position indeed. The Soviet Union discovered this truth to its
cost, China discovered it and adapted before it also collapsed. Cuba and North
Korea and Venezuela and Bolivia and Nicaragua may rail against capitalism but
they depend on it for their very lives while Europe grapples with the reality
that hard-working and thrifty Germans cannot support the rest of Europe on
their own: There’s something wrong with asking them to pay higher taxes so
Greeks can retire at 45.
Highly intelligent and possessed of rarefied
sensitivities as he is supposed to be, however, Priest-King insists that the
problems that other countries have had with socialism are attributable to the
fact that he wasn’t in charge. If Great Britain was teetering on economic
collapse in 1979, then the problem wasn’t egregiously high taxes and welfare
spending but rather he wasn’t there to raise them even higher. A devotee of the Keynesian school of economic
thought, Priest-King believes that government spending stimulates growth, so if
you want faster growth, you spend more.
This would be fine if government actually generated its own revenue but
everyone, including Priest-King, knows it does not. Government takes money from people and
businesses who’ve earned it and redistributes it as the government sees fit,
something like giving yourself a transfusion and about as likely to stimulate
economic growth with the exception that, with a transfusion, you don’t incur
debt. It’s an inescapable fact that
Priest-King and his coterie of hypnotized followers choose to ignore, instead
choosing to believe that if the poor and the middle class are subsidized just
enough, they’ll attain a new level
of affluence and security and if the rich are taxed just heavily enough,
they’ll stop outperforming their neighbors and accept a lower standard of
living for themselves. Priest-King has
vigorously exercised his belief over the past six years, spending over $20
trillion ($8 trillion of which was borrowed), creating a gigantic new Federal
construct for rationing health care, spending trillions of dollars on stimulus
projects that didn’t exist, home mortgage bailouts and car company bailouts and
green energy projects that failed and yet the economy remains punch-drunk. Over five million jobs have been eliminated
during his administration and if unemployment has declined, it has declined
because people have either given up looking for work entirely or accepted a
part-time job because no full-time jobs were available. Meanwhile, Wall Street sets records and the
gap between rich and poor has actually widened, so given the results achieved,
one would conclude that Priest-King’s policies have failed utterly to attain
his goal, but that would require intellectual honesty which
Priest-King does not have. His political
philosophy is founded on class warfare and using government as a cudgel to beat
the bourgeoisie into submission, so rather than abandon an approach that has
clearly flopped, he soldiers on, defiantly.
His FY2016 budget rests at $4.1 trillion with at least $438 billion of
new debt, he proposes to cancel the sequestration cuts that have only
moderately slowed government spending and instead raise spending by 7% across
the board; he further proposes to increase taxes by $2 trillion over the next
ten years (including a 14% tax on U.S. corporate profits held overseas) and to
offer the first two years of community college for free, which of course means
that someone else gets the bill. This is
a preposterous budget made more so by the fact that Priest-King suffered yet
another punishing mid-term defeat only three months ago. He faces strong Republican majorities in the
House and Senate and in state legislatures across the country and rather than
at least attempt to negotiate with the opposition, he raises his middle
finger. This may be red meat to his true
believers on the Left but it also defies reason: Colossal taxes and spending have
not helped and cannot help the poor because they do nothing about the
natural ability some people have toward industry and prosperity and the natural
inclination of others to stay exactly where they are. Saying so may cause Nancy Pelosi’s head to
explode but it’s the truth nonetheless.
We would all be better off if Priest-King proposed cutting the top
individual and top corporate tax rates to 25% respectively, eliminating capital
gains taxes and balancing the Federal budget by 2025, recognizing that doing so
would energize prosperous people to expand existing businesses or start new
ones, buy new equipment or floor space, hire more workers and invest and create
better jobs and thereby help everyone, but he is indeed the Priest-King and he
knows better than everyone else and that in a nutshell explains why the
suffering will continue, unabated.
