printShepard Smith of Fox News encapsulated what to him was the counter argument for taxes on the person earning $20 million annually: “He’ll be $1 million the poorer. Is that going to impact his life style, asked Smith? Will he fire the chauffeur? Not really.”
That’s also not really the right, utilitarian, economic argument for letting a man keep what is his. One million in the hands of government is one million dollars circulating the drain. As soon as you transfer private property into communal ownership, it’s as good as squandered. Left as private property, that money could be saved, invested in productive endeavors, or spent on consumer goods, which will generate work for producers.
How do you think the government collective will allocate $1million it has stolen, and has never worked to generate?
To the moral side of the matter:
From “The 2 Parties’ Question: How Much To Steal”: 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.
With a tax cut, the plundering class simply agrees to pilfer less. The notion that you must ‘pay for tax cuts’… is akin to a burglar promising to return the television he stole just as soon as he is in a better financial position.”
The old Russell Long adage “Don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax the guy behind the tree” has been operating for years – but it is our children “hiding behind the tree”! It is called the DEFICIT.
Just as the virus is the source of evil and the temperature (fever) is the symptom – the tax is the symptom of the problem but the evil is the SPENDING.
In my old age, I’ve endeavored to resist getting sucked into these idiot debates on sales tax vs. income tax; progressive vs. flat; withholding tax vs. employee paying – not because I cannot “play” that game – but because it distracts from focusing on the STATIST BEAST.
Government has NO legitimacy spending money on anything that does not (1) apply to the general benefit of all vs. a select few [the origin of the phrase “general welfare”] and (2) protect our lives, liberties, and PROPERTY. Any other spending is immoral theft. Whether the illicit theft gets sucked from the rich or from the poor, from corporations or individuals, from the living or the dead or generations unborn- is a secondary consideration. We are, sadly, feeding the cancer that will devour us.
Whether one steals from the rich or poor is unimportant, theft is theft.
“The rich” as defined by liberal thinkers come in at a lot less per annum than 20 million bucks. Also so many of “the rich” only look rich because their businesses show up as personal income. Even forgetting these arguments where does the government or their masses huddled on Uncle Sam’s welfare plantations get off with the idea that they deserve someone else’s money?