Posted on 03/11/2009 7:11:08 AM PDT by MindBender26
Imagine my surprise to hear Chris Matthews, on his February 26 broadcast, enthusiastically announce that President Obama is “promising to tax the rich people in order to pay for health care for the working people.”
Dear Mr. Matthews: maybe you are a rich person who doesn’t earn your money and doesn’t work. Since I see you working on TV all the time, perhaps you secretly feel that cheerleading for Barack Obama isn’t really “work.” I’m willing to accept your critical self-assessment.
But I and all the other people I know earning over $250,000.00 a year – and into seven figures – well,we are definitely working people. Most of us work longer hours than our employees do, take more work home to do in evenings, and work more weekend hours than our employees do. Many of us travel and spend a great deal of time away from our families. Many of us bear enormous executive responsibility and the stress that comes with it.
We also do more valuable work – not by accident, but because we have worked very hard to make ourselves more valuable. We have chosen to learn more and keep learning more; read more, play less; develop expertise. And almost all of us worked much, much, much harder than the ‘average working person’ for years, even decades, to create our businesses, master our crafts and skills, build our reputations, and finally put ourselves in positions to harvest our current high incomes.
As a matter of fact, our willingness to work more and work harder than most of those you designate as “working people” might just be the reason we now, finally earn much higher incomes. I know this is a troubling concept for liberals, but there it is: cause and effect.
So when you speak class warfare, it enrages us. Your dividing of Americans into separate groups, “working people” and “rich” – thus characterizing the rich as “not working people” – is obscene.
Oh, and just for the record, we already pay extraordinarily high taxes. More importantly, we pay an exorbitant share of the total U.S. tax burden – far, far in excess of the difference between our incomes and those paying less, little or none, and far in excess of our ratio to the population and our consumption of services.
We are Atlas, already carrying the entire nation on our shoulders, and we are now tempted to shrug. You see, we could choose not to work if sufficiently antagonized, assaulted and abused. And for every one of us who takes the next four years off, thousands can kiss their jobs bye-bye. If that’s a surprise to you, I’d be delighted to explain it with specific examples.
We not only work harder than all those we provide jobs for, we also provide nearly all the capital and take all the risks to create businesses and build communities and retail centers and everything else that provide the majority of jobs.
Those you see as working people create no jobs for themselves; we non-working rich provide them all. If we put our capital on strike for the next four years – a strike already in progress – there’ll be 16 to 20 percent or worse unemployment, a 3,000 or lower Dow wiping out all working peoples’ pensions and retirements entirely, boarded up businesses as far as the eye can see, and no health care for anybody.
Yes, that’s a threat.
Finally, a quick math lesson. There are no more than six million of us (give or take) that Obama has targeted for his grand panoply of stated income tax increases, backdoor tax increases via the taking away of real estate interest, charitable giving and other deductions, capital gains tax increases, etc.If you confiscated 100 percent of our combined incomes, you still couldn’t pay for everybody’s health care.
This is the most vile lie ever told to those working people. Why? Because every dollar of income stolen from me with taxes I retrieve plus three from those working people, to cover the taxes and overhead. I do so by: downsizing companies and cutting jobs, outsourcing jobs, not investing in expansion and creating jobs, and by raising prices. The last, raising prices, causes inflation, the biggest tax on working people and the only tax on poor people. Every tax-the-rich scheme costs far more than it gets. Nothing else could come close to the destruction guaranteed by abusively taxing the rich.
Some honest reporting about all this would consider the so-obvious folly of trying to force six million people to buy health care for 200-million; acknowledge that Obama is not merely returning top tax rates to Clinton or pre-Reagan points but that he is laying on myriad tax increases by removing deductions; and would stop smearing the rich as not-working-people. We ought to be thanked, daily. Better, we should be encouraged to work at creating and building things, but right now we’ve set that aside to work at out-maneuvering Obama’s tax assault, and watch how hard we work at that.
As long as the left has existed, The French Revolution comes to mind, they have demonized the “rich”. When there are no more “rich” in a nation, you have Zimbabwe..................
Eventually, the tax code will have to be changed so that there is a way to distinguish between businesses and individuals. That would be the only way to tax the rich without killing businesses.
bump
"...Tax the rich, feed the poor
Till there are no rich no more."
To me, these lines illustrate the essential difference between Liberals and Conservatives.
If a Conservative wrote those lines they would read;
"...Tax the rich, feed the poor
Till there are no poor no more."
Mathews deserves nothing but a good nut-kicking.
Don't worry. They'll take care of that.
Directive 10-289 will put a stop to that.
L
IF Chrissy were to ever get a real job, that tingle he feels running up his leg would be replaced by sh!t filling up his briefs, every time obama spoke.
If you’re self-empyed, it doesn’t matter; your business income is your personal income.
Taxing the rich kills business either way. If I make a million a year but have to pay an extra $100,000 in income taxes under Obama I don’t eat out as much. I don’t buy a new car, or a new boat, or build a vacation home. I consume less, because my income is lower; that overall consumption loss is spread out over the businesses that I support.
Liberals are idiots.. they never learn.
Excellent!
I doubt he has any to kick.................
Excuse me? Those of us who own our own businesses pay BOTH individual AND business taxes already, thank you. Which is why after 50 years of busting my ass, I retired...I got tired of working 6 months out of the year to pay my taxes just so others could sit on their fat asses and draw welfare! And with HALF the population dependent on the government for their livelihood, it's time for the non-working half to get off their ass and GO GET A JOB!
Pretty good, but this is wrong: “[...] backdoor tax increases via the taking away of real estate interest [...]”
A tax deduction is merely the government not levying a fine on those who don’t act the way it wants.
Gee, that’s exactly what Warren Buffet found out.
When 0 demonizes Corporate airplanes, Buffet’s airplane business dies.
I agree with the article writer that Matthews' idea is nonsense. But class warfare is incorrect both ways and the idea that any group has a monopoly on hard work and usefulness is also detrimental. Some of the hardest working, most honorable and socially useful people work the so-called humblest jobs.
I think the original is the correct one. You will eliminate the rich before you eliminate the poor.
Right on the nose. And the assumption that capitalism perfectly allocates resources according to value is a fallacy that has been quite clearly demonstrated. A person who could be quite valuable to others but cannot bargain well is not paid as well as those who create nothing but can swindle a deal.
Ugh...I mean that those who don’t do what the government wants get taxed more than those who comply with government desires. It’s a fine on non-compliance.
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