At last night’s Democrat debate schoolyard brawl/whine-fest, the unifying theme was, “Let’s bash millionaires and billionaires!” No, wait a minute…let’s just bash billionaires because everyone up there, perhaps with the exception of Boot Edge Edge, (although his CNN or MSNBC contract is waiting) is already a millionaire.
This is one of the big problems of the Democrats. SUCCESS
ENVY. Does anyone honestly think, if having invented a product or service that
makes a billion dollars, Klobuchar, Buttigieg or Sanders would say, “No, I’ve
made too much money?” The hypocrisy of the Left stinks to high heaven.
Hey, I’m envious of billionaires too. I wish I had invented
a better service than Quotron (the predecessor to the Bloomberg product/service)
and made billions. I’ll bet the “My Pillow” guy is doing ok too!
The problem with the Left is their envy has always
manifested itself in a Robin Hood complex. Unable to achieve success on their own,
they demand that those who have it give the fruits of that success to them.
They argue that those who succeeded either gamed the system somehow, or stepped
all over exploited workers, cheated, or were successful because the government was
responsible for that success (“You didn’t build that.” – Barack Obama).
It’s the winners against the losers. Irrespective of how the
billionaires made their money, let’s think through what would happen if Sanders
or Warren were elected and able to impose confiscatory taxes on people making,
I think one of the suggestions is, more than $600,000 per year.
- The arithmetic is extremely simple and everyone
with half a brain already knows that even if you taxed ALL of that income at
100% there wouldn’t be enough money to fund the Democrat utopian dream list.
- If you imposed those taxes, would the high
income earners put the same amount of money away in private equity, venture
capital, hedge or mutual funds, the pools of capital that fuel innovation, job
creation, and which indeed trickle down (sometimes flash flood down) to employees
thereby boosting the economy and growth in general? And what would that do to
the American Spirit and the American Dream? Would people still work hard to advance
their careers, think out of the box, invent new things, hire employees, shop
more at Saks or WalMart? Of course not. Their consumption and spending would
decrease as they would be deprived of the incentive to make more than the specified
threshold.
- If you actually confiscate wealth as some
Leftists have suggested, i.e. say to the wealthy…”I’m going to demand you give us
X% of your 401(k) or stock portfolio or savings account so we can redistribute it
by providing healthcare or tuition free college for all” for example, how hard
will you want to work knowing you’ll be penalized if you’re actually
successful?
- Look at those people on stage in South Carolina
last night. Even if you’re the most altruistic person in America, would you
really want ANY of them to decide how to redistribute and allocate the money
they’ve taken from you in taxes?
For further understanding of what
happens when Democrats take your money and redistribute it, you need look
no further than Obama’s 2012 $800 billion, “shovel ready projects”,
so-called “stimulus package”. Here’s the breakdown of how that our money was
spent:
First of all, it galls me that “Individual Tax Cuts” are
called “stimulus” at all. TAX CUTS ARE THE ABSENCE OF INCOME OR
WEALTH CONFISCATION, NOT GOVERNMENT SPENDING! (TAX REBATES, by the way,
are a RETURN OF YOUR OWN MONEY THAT THE GOVERNMENT PREVIOUSLY CONFISCATED) It’s
RELIEF, not STIMULUS. Are you stimulated by the act of a government bureaucrat taking
out the nail they drove into your forehead?
Same goes for Alternative Minimum Tax Relief, the second
item in the chart. It too was just the absence of additional taxation and had
nothing to do with “shovel ready projects”.
State Fiscal Relief wasn’t infrastructure spending either –
it was handouts to fiscally irresponsible states, particularly
Democrat-controlled states. As with “Aid to Directly Impacted Individuals”, it
trickled down only to the public sector unions to fund their entitlement (pensions
and healthcare) spending shortfalls and to shore up welfare spending as well.
The final category…Public Investment Outlays… paid for the
signs you saw on some of the highways and parkways around you. Did we really
see much of any benefit to our nation’s roads and railways from that $270
billion? No. And so only 1/3 of the so-called “Stimulus” went to “infrastructure
projects”. The rest went to reward favorite Democrat constituencies, i.e. into
the ether.
I used to think Liberals were altruistic. I’ve learned over
the years that their motivations are either the garnering of power for power’s
sake, or an unbounded arrogance that if they have power and control of our money,
they can make everybody happy. Both are evil because they deprive us of the
impetus to work hard and achieve success for ourselves, and by extension, our
families, communities and our country.
So do we really want Bernie Sanders, Elisabeth Warren, Joe Biden or any of the other megalomaniacal, power-famished hypocrites who were on that stage last night in charge of the government?
To Buffet and Gates’ credit, they’re working hard to give much of their wealth away and there are a lot of true needs and programs where philanthropy is the beginning of a solution. The various charities that build water purification plants in Africa such as “Action Against Hunger” or Doctors Without Borders are good examples, or here at home, the Tunnel to Towers Foundation or the Appalachia Service Project. Do you really want any of those Democrat candidates determining how money should be doled out for such projects? Not all, but the vast majority of Democrat controlled spending consists of handouts to “victims” who with hands out will vote to keep them in power.
I’d like to be a billionaire too. I wouldn’t buy a yacht. I
wouldn’t buy a bigger house. I would still insist that my kids and grandkids work
at McDonalds when they turn 16, or stock shelves as mine did. And I’d find
those meaningful charities that TRULY support the TRULY needy, or that promote
self-reliance, meritocracy, the production of goods and services that advance
the frontiers of science and health, human longevity, and natural resource
renewal and preservation (NOT ENVIRO-FASCISM BUT CLASSIC CONSERVATION).
Please let’s stop allowing the Left to serve as our nanny, putting
spoonful’s of pablum in and wiping the corners of our mouths while
congratulating themselves over champagne on how well they’re taking care of us.
Please America, just at the point where we’re starting to get back to basics,
let’s not empower demagogues such as we saw at the debate last night to spew
their utopian fantasies or, God forbid, enact more of their soul-crushing
plans.
