Obama’s plan to ‘tax the rich’ is simply class warfare — and politics

Let’s talk about fairness in the tax system. The top 10 percent of income-earners pay 70 percent of all federal income taxes. Almost half of all Americans — 46 percent of them — do not pay a single nickel in federal income tax. Doesn’t that sound grossly unfair?

The productive people who earn a lot of money are paying far more than their share — seven times as much as an equal distribution would suggest. They’re subsidizing everybody else. And almost half the people are freeloading off the wealthy. Isn’t that the real unfairness in the system?

Apparently not, according to Barack Obama and progressive left Democrats. They want the people who are already shouldering a hugely disproportionate portion of the burden to pay even more. Why? Isn’t it ultimately the simple fact that they don’t like it that some people make so much more money than others? They’re not going to be happy until we’re all one big socialist family — except for themselves and their buddies of course. They don’t mind those people getting special deals.

First, our high income earners are already paying massively more than they should, because people shouldn’t have to subsidize each other. Even if you believe in a coercive state and a coercive tax system — which I don’t — people should pay only for their share of the services produced by government. For some reason, people are hung up on calculating the “price” to be paid for government services in percentages of income. But even by that measure, high-income earners are already paying plenty, according to this “fact check from the Associated Press.

The bottom line is that anyone who tells you that the wealthy aren’t paying enough taxes — whether it’s Obama or Warren Buffet — is either lying or badly misinformed.

When you go to buy a car or a loaf of bread or anything else you want to buy, nobody asks your income and calculates a percentage — charging wildly different prices in ways that punish people for being productive and earning money. To do so wouldn’t be fairness. It would be a shakedown — and that’s exactly what the federal income tax system is.

The real message to high-income earners: “There are more of us than there are of you, so you will pay whatever we tell you to pay. And if you complain, we’ll call you greedy and take more.”

It’s class warfare, and it has one goal. It’s all about the elections next year. Obama and the Democrats want to turn the elections — both presidential and congressional — into a battle between “the rich” (represented by the GOP) and everybody else (represented by the noble Democrats). The Democrats are serious about the current tax increase proposal, because they know the U.S. House won’t pass it. This is merely a way for them to associate Republicans with rich people and win votes next year.

Even if you believe in coercive taxation, surely you can see that the current tax system is unfair. But the unfairness hits the people who are productive enough to make a lot of money, not the close-to-half who are freeloading on the other half.

As long as there’s a majoritarian system — where a majority have the right to pick the pockets of whoever they please — this unfairness is going to continue. And we’re going to continue to hear liars tell us that “the wealthy” should pay more. They’re either liars or idiots. Take your pick.