Traveling the television talk-show circuit this weekend, Barack Obama\u2019s aides and advisers tested the waters for likely public response should the new president completely gut his campaign pledge to middle-class Americans that \u201cYou will not see any of your taxes increase one single dime.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Obama has already signed tax hikes on alcohol and cigarettes, with no exemptions for the middle class. But the aides indicated the president now contemplates going much further.<\/p>\n
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on Sunday said he cannot rule out higher taxes to help tame an exploding budget deficit. Meantime, President Obama\u2019s chief economic adviser, National Economic Council Director Larry Summers, would not dismiss raising them on middle-class Americans as part of a health-care overhaul.<\/p>\n
On network TV Sunday, both Mr. Geithner and Mr. Summers sidestepped direct questions on Obama\u2019s intentions about taxes. But Mr. Geithner said the White House was not ready to rule out a tax hike to lower the federal deficit; Mr. Summers said Obama\u2019s proposed health-care overhaul needs funding from somewhere.<\/p>\n
This was all completely predictable. Idealistic leftists (that is to say, would-be-looters with intellectual manners and pretensions) have been arguing for a century that they could fund massive and popular hand-outs to the masses — free schooling, free retirement pensions, free medical care, whatever — merely by increasing taxes on \u201cthe rich.\u201d And for more than a century, the little men with the green eyeshades and the slide rules have been pointing out to them, \u201cNo you can\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n
As you increase tax rates on \u201cthe rich,\u201d the first thing you learn is that \u201cthe rich\u201d are not a fixed target. \u201cThe rich\u201d hire bankers and lawyers to help them find legal ways to move their money — and, if it gets bad enough, themselves — into \u201ctax shelters,\u201d out of the local jurisdiction, or (finally) offshore.<\/p>\n
Raise taxes high enough, and receipts can actually drop.<\/p>\n
In the former Soviet Union, combined taxes could often add up to more than 100 percent of a person\u2019s income. How could anyone pay such rates? The answer is that they didn\u2019t. They fled, they hid their assets, they bribed officials to look the other way. They doubtless still do.<\/p>\n
But the first casualty was something American politicians still count on — that most citizens will want to voluntarily \u201cpay what they owe.\u201d<\/p>\n
Second, and more importantly, what the number crunchers are also at endless pains to point out to their unhappy political bosses is that \u00d0 even, if by some miracle, you could round up all \u201cthe rich\u201d at once, hold them upside down and shake them, setting them loose with nothing but their underwear and a begging bowl — it STILL wouldn\u2019t provide enough to fund their endlessly multiplying welfare schemes.<\/p>\n
To do that, you have to tax the same \u201cmiddle class\u201d to whom you\u2019re promising all those benefits.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe simple reality remains that his ambitious overhaul of how Americans receive health care — promised without increasing the federal deficit — must be paid for,\u201d concluded Philip Elliott of The Associated Press Sunday night, in what purported to be a piece of \u201cstraight\u201d news reporting on the network TV appearances.<\/p>\n
But in the first place, if the goal is to change health care so it costs less, why does that have to be \u201cpaid for\u201d? This is like reducing your family budget by eating cold cereal for supper on Friday night instead of steak dinners, and then whining that somehow the transition to cold cereal must be \u201cpaid for.\u201d If the steak dinners used to cost $100 and the cold cereal with milk now costs $3, you\u2019ve saved $97 for some other purpose. What do you need new money to \u201cpay for\u201d?<\/p>\n
But probably the most accomplished piece of siren song in Mr. Elliott\u2019s AP report was his explanation that the president\u2019s men hit the TV trail this weekend to float tax-hike trial balloons \u201cas the White House sought to balance campaign rhetoric with governing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wow. When public figures get into trouble for cheating on their wives, do we report that they were \u201cseeking to balance their marriage vows with the need to find some action while they\u2019re away from home?\u201d Do we then admire those who have managed the best \u201cbalancing\u201d act?<\/p>\n
Of course not. Humans may be fallible, but if someone breaks a marriage vow, they\u2019re breaking it, not \u201cbalancing\u201d it against some other, equally legitimate \u201cneed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Similarly, the notion that breaking a vital, make-or-break, unambiguous campaign promise somehow merely shows a statesmanlike grasp of the need to \u201cbalance\u201d campaign-trail promises that the boobs should never have been dumb enough to believe in the first place, against the vital current need to loot more from their pockets, is appalling, repulsive, and utterly corrosive to anything that remains of Americans\u2019 civic virtue and trust in government.<\/p>\n
If the goal were accuracy, what should have been reported is that Messrs. Geithner and Summers this weekend floated tax-hike trial balloons \u201cas the White House sought to learn whether it can break the most important campaign promise Mr. Obama made last year in order to get elected, without suffering the kind of defeat in 2010 that could make Ron Paul the Speaker of the House and Rush Limbaugh the majority leader of the U.S. Senate.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Obama is under no \u201cobligation\u201d to break his campaign pledge and seek tax hikes. He could simply ask Congress to start repealing the most expensive parts of our current socialized medical scheme for the poor and the elderly, informing doctors and patients they\u2019re just going to have to go back to negotiating their own payment arrangements as they did before 1965, without any 35-hour-a-week government bureaucrats overseeing the process.<\/p>\n
The whole scheme is going to collapse, eventually. Why not start taking it apart while it can still be done in an orderly manner?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Traveling the television talk-show circuit this weekend, Barack Obama\u2019s aides and advisers tested the waters for likely public response should the new president completely gut his campaign pledge to middle-class Americans that \u201cYou will not see any of your taxes increase one single dime.\u201d Mr. Obama has already signed tax hikes on alcohol and cigarettes, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[30,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2008-election","category-taxation"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-4D","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=287"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":288,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287\/revisions\/288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}