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Share253 Print Forward John Stossel What is fair? by John Stossel 03/21/2012 159 Comments President Obama says he wants to make society more fair. Advocates of big government believe fairness means taking from rich people and giving to others: poor people; or people who do things politicians approve of, like making "green" energy equipment (Solyndra); or old people (even rich ones) through Social Security and Medicare. The idea that government can "make life fair" is intuitively appealing to people -- at least until they think about it. I'll try to help. Obama says fairness requires higher taxes, but as The...

Journalists are much more tolerant of attacks on Christianity than Islam. It is a fact. ABC is airing a television show called “Good Christian Bitches.” Never mind the outrage over the recent Sandra Fluke business, but there is a double standard. And let’s not fool ourselves as the media would never tolerate a story where “Muslim” was substituted for “Christian” in that show. The media’s present politically correct excuse is that Islam binds certain minority group’s cultures in a way Christianity does not. First, that is crap and speaks of a secular ignorance about many Christian communities even in this...

"Liberals love to think of themselves as intellectual and nuanced, but liberalism is incredibly simplistic. It's nothing more than ‘childlike emotionalism applied to adult issues.’ Very seldom does any issue that doesn't involve pandering to their supporters boil down at its core level to more than feeling ‘nice’ or ‘mean’ to liberals. This makes liberals ill equipped to deal with complex issues." -- John Hawkins, September 21, 2007   Liberals are actually worse than children, not just because it's so appalling to see adults who view themselves as highly intelligent and sophisticated thinking like little kids, but because in...

During a recent Fox News Channel debate about the Obama administration's tax policies, Democrat Bob Beckel raised the issue of "fairness." He pointed out that a child born to a poor woman in the Bronx enters the world with far worse prospects than a child born to an affluent couple in Connecticut. No one can deny that. The relevant question, however, is: How does allowing politicians to take more money in taxes from successful people, to squander in ways that will improve their own reelection prospects, make anything more "fair" for others? Even if additional tax revenue all went...

The logic of the Obama Administration is that out of its sense of fairness, it will provide what America lacks. Not merely a chicken in every pot, but a condom, an insurance plan and any other convenience of modern life needed by those who otherwise might have to do without – or, perish the thought, have to fend for themselves. It’s quite incidental to the Equalizer-in-Chief that these acts of governmental “fairness” to balance all of life’s scales of inequity must come at someone’s expense, which tilts another scale out of balance. But, as we said, that’s incidental...

At the Maldives' National Museum, smashed Buddhist statues are testament to the rise of Islamic extremism and Taliban-style intolerance in a country famous as a laid-back holiday destination. On Tuesday, as protesters backed by mutinous police toppled president Mohamed Nasheed, a handful of men stormed the Chinese-built museum and destroyed its display of priceless artefacts from the nation's pre-Islamic era. "They have effectively erased all evidence of our Buddhist past," a senior museum official told AFP at the now shuttered building in the capital Male, asking not to be named out of fear for his own safety. "We lost all...

President Obama has frequently justified his policies—and judged their outcomes—in terms of equity, justice and fairness. That raises an obvious question: How does our existing system—and his own policy record—stack up according to those criteria? Is it fair that the richest 1% of Americans pay nearly 40% of all federal income taxes, and the richest 10% pay two-thirds of the tax? Is it fair that the richest 10% of Americans shoulder a higher share of their country's income-tax burden than do the richest 10% in every other industrialized nation, including socialist Sweden? Is it fair that American corporations pay the...

President Obama is now campaigning all of the country in the name of “fairness” especially how it relates to the US Tax Code. According to President Obama, “fair” means a progressive tax (where as one makes more money, they pay a higher percentage in taxes). What he’s trying to do through his “fairness” campaign is make the progressive tax more progressive by increasing tax rates on those that have higher incomes. According to the Obama administration, it is more “fair,” to raise taxes on the rich. I’m here to tell you that this isn’t true. Of course all of that...

In his third State of the Union address last night, President Obama channeled the mantra of U.S. progressive groups by repeatedly calling for so-called economic fairness in America. Some progressives point to revolutionary socialist Karl Marx as divining economic theory that stresses “economic fairness.” Also, late Harvard professor John Rawls, one of the most important philosophers of liberalism in the twentieth century, named his own theory “justice as fairness.” Some have previously pointed to Rawls possible influence over Obama. Rawls calls for ensuring distributive justice of resources. The headlines in scores of U.S. newspapers and news websites today stress the...

When I hear others say "fair share," I know what is coming -- a diatribe against the wealthy followed by recommendations to more heavily tax "millionaires and billionaires." The specifics usually follow. I learn that it isn't just millionaires and billionaires who are targeted. The actual income threshold is $200,000 for individuals and $250,000 for married couples, and it is business and investment income that constitute the real target. You know: the evil capitalists. Today, the current top tax rate of 15% for capital gains and dividends is getting a lot of attention because of the recent release of Mitt...

During his State of the Union address Tuesday night, President Obama pushed for higher tax rates on what he called “the wealthiest Americans.”  He declared: “Tax reform should follow the Buffett rule: If you make more than $1 million a year, you should not pay less than 30 percent in taxes.” As usual, the president motivated the higher taxes with references to “fair play” and getting the wealthy to pay their “fair share” of taxes. “Fairness” was the codeword of the State of the Union address, not the chronic problem of lingering high unemployment, something the president never even mentioned. ...

We heard a lot on Tuesday night from President Obama about the wealthy paying their “fair share” in his State of the Union speech. (Well, you heard it a lot; I read the speech and then commenced to have a life on Tuesday night.) Obama made half a dozen references to fairness in relation to taxes in the address, including taking a shot at Congress: But in return, we need to change our tax code so that people like me, and an awful lot of members of Congress, pay our fair share of taxes. Just like with charity, perhaps fairness...

Taxes: If President Obama wants to create a fairer country, shouldn't he start by fairly portraying our tax code? Instead, he used his State of the Union speech to peddle a number of blatant tax falsehoods.

Republican candidate Mitt Romney could have released his income tax returns two days ago or two weeks from now. Instead, he dumped 500 pages of his returns into America’s raging class warfare zone on the same day President Barack Obama was set to deliver his State of the Union address — an election document that, among other things, contained numerous devices aimed at expanding the war. Welcome to the United States of Envy, land of the free and home of the brave so long as nobody makes too much more money than the next guy. The President’s address was peppered...

If State of the Union speech leaks are any indication, the president wants his re-election campaign to be about fairness.... But Obama has miserably failed even by his own definition of fairness. Under his administration, the only ones winning are the rich and well connected. Everyone else continues to suffer.

“No matter your thoughts about the Occupy Wall Street movement, the protesters were right in at least one respect: The rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer.” Variations on this statement were repeated in dozens of blogs, commentaries, and even news reports in the past months. The claim comes via a Congressional Budget Office analysis that shows incomes for the top 1 percent of Americans growing by 275 percent between 1979 and 2007, while the lowest 20 percent saw their inflation-adjusted incomes grow by “only” 18 percent. The numbers from the report are correct, but the assertions...

The most prevalent theme in President Barack Obama's Dec. 6 Osawatomie, Kan., speech was the need for greater "fairness." In fact, though the president never defined the term fair(ness), he used it 15 times. Explaining his new hero, Teddy Roosevelt, Obama said: "But Roosevelt also knew that the free market has never been a free license to take whatever you can from whomever you can. He understood the free market only works when there are rules of the road that ensure competition is fair and open and honest." What's fair competition is somewhat subjective, but let me suggest a few...

To: Presidential campaigns How will your Candidate deal with the serious problem of our broken political system, corrupted by special interest money, contaminated by a breathtaking lack of ethics and perpetuated by the manipulation of a misinformed or ignorant electorate? Your Candidate's good ideas and solutions will not manifest or endure until that situation is corrected. Our critical challenges will not be solved within a broken political system.Here are just a few suggestions: * All campaign financing should be completely transparent. Our current president received millions from undisclosed “small donor” contributors. A small donor contributing many times becomes a large...

One thing is certainly true about President Obama - no matter how many times people point out the falsehoods in his speeches, he just keeps making them. Case in point: his latest "economic fairness" address. In that speech Tuesday, Obama once again tried to build a case for his liberal, big-spending, tax-hiking, regulatory agenda. But as with so many of his past appeals, Obama's argument rests on a pile of untruths. Among the most glaring: • Tax cuts and deregulation have "never worked" to grow the economy. There's so much evidence to disprove this claim, it's hard to know where...