Barack Obama does not understand the difference between a TAX CUT and a TAX CREDIT. He thinks cutting taxes is tantamount to cutting welfare checks. In an “hour-long town hall meeting sponsored by CNBC,” aimed at bamboozling “Boobus Americanus” with his “eloquence,” Obama declared:
“What the Republicans are proposing is that we . . . provide tax relief to primarily millionaires and billionaires. It would cost us $700 billion to do it. On average, millionaires would get a check of $100,000.”
“Tax credits” are not tax cuts, they are “subsidies disguised as tax cuts. In other words, they are spending in the form of direct transfers from the treasury to individuals, except that they are administered by the tax authorities rather than the agencies usually responsible for welfare.”
A better definition of tax credits is social tinkering or engineering, as they target certain politically desirable constituents to the detriment of others. “Taxpayers can receive a raft of tax credits if they engage in various government-specified activities,” confirms Peter Ferrara, director of entitlement and budget policy for the Institute for Policy Innovation.
A tax cut, of course, is a reduction in tax rates. It means letting a poor sod (or serf) keep more of his rightful earnings.
The man with the reverse-Midas touch—who cannot get his head around the idea of property rights—added that “his administration is looking at the possibility of a payroll tax holiday, in addition to research-and-development tax breaks for corporations.”
Taxes are private property plundered. The government has several ways to pay for its obligations, one of which is to seize private property in the form of taxes. The particular portion of the “stim” and bailouts that was not borrowed or counterfeited by the Fed once belonged to individual Americans. Thus, a tax cut for high-income earners, who also pay most of the taxes, is tantamount to a return of stolen goods.
The distinction between what is mine and what is thine evades the president.
The reason the line about soaking the rich “drew applause from the audience of about 200 or so gathered at the Newseum in Washington” is to be found in an experiment conducted at the Universities of Warwick and Oxford, which was more of a confirmation than an investigation of human nature.
“Ingeniously operationalized by Professor Andrew Oswald and Dr. Daniel Zizzo, the experiment demonstrated the lengths to which people will go to destroy the wealth of others, even if, in the process, they knowingly wipe out their own funds.”
“The economists approximated reality by distributing cash unequally among the subjects, who were then told they could anonymously ‘burn away other people’s money,’ with one caveat: in the process, they would be destroying some of their own. Naively, the researchers expected little ‘burning’ to occur, and certainly for it to stop once the destruction of the opponent’s money became too painful to the player’s pocket. They were flummoxed when 62 percent of the subjects continued to ‘burn’ the wealth of others even at crippling costs to themselves.”
Laboratory-to-life extrapolations can be problematic, but this experiment transports effortlessly.
UPDATE (Sept. 21): “What Should We Do With the Estate Tax?” is the title of a legit article in the War Street Journal. Evidently, an inheritance belongs to the royal “We.” “A huge amount of money hangs in the balance,” says the author of the piece. Whose bloody money is it anyway?
On the bright side: a slight deviation from rank utilitarianism is evident in questioning whether “such a tax is fair to heirs, not to mention the people who worked and saved over the decades to build up those assets.”