Victor Davis Hanson: Obama’s Washington Animal Farm
[NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the editor of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome, and the author of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.]
Since the moment he announced his presidential candidacy, Barack Obama has waged a tireless, now four-year-long spread-the-wealth campaign against the more affluent.
He drew his mythical them/us line at $250,000 in annual income: If you went into the dark territory above that level, all sorts of promised punishments would kick in. At various times his administration has called for higher income taxes on this group, health-care surcharges, and removing the caps on income subject to Social Security payroll taxes — all to be added to higher state and local taxes. And, of course, higher capital-gains and inheritances taxes as well.
The president is not interested in nuances. He does not care that 40 percent of Americans pay no income taxes, or that the top 1 percent of earners pay 40 percent of aggregate collected income-tax revenue. Yet many of the people in these brackets were not always so rich and probably won’t be for long. Top incomes are transient. Millions of Americans strive to reach them for a few years to provide for retirement, or college expenses, in the expectation that they will fade quickly. A quarter of a million dollars in annual compensation is great money in North Dakota, rather less so in Manhattan or the Bay Area.
Furthermore, most of these upper-income earners are the owners of small businesses, which simply calibrate proposed taxes in terms of money not available to hire employees and buy equipment. In contrast, the president assumes that a hardware-store owner or a small manufacturer already concedes that he makes too much money. The idea seems to be that, in penance, he will cut his profit margin and, for the public good, will gladly pay more of what profits remain to an Ivy League technocracy that knows far better than he how to spend his ill-gotten revenue on others more deserving....
Read entire article at National Review
Since the moment he announced his presidential candidacy, Barack Obama has waged a tireless, now four-year-long spread-the-wealth campaign against the more affluent.
He drew his mythical them/us line at $250,000 in annual income: If you went into the dark territory above that level, all sorts of promised punishments would kick in. At various times his administration has called for higher income taxes on this group, health-care surcharges, and removing the caps on income subject to Social Security payroll taxes — all to be added to higher state and local taxes. And, of course, higher capital-gains and inheritances taxes as well.
The president is not interested in nuances. He does not care that 40 percent of Americans pay no income taxes, or that the top 1 percent of earners pay 40 percent of aggregate collected income-tax revenue. Yet many of the people in these brackets were not always so rich and probably won’t be for long. Top incomes are transient. Millions of Americans strive to reach them for a few years to provide for retirement, or college expenses, in the expectation that they will fade quickly. A quarter of a million dollars in annual compensation is great money in North Dakota, rather less so in Manhattan or the Bay Area.
Furthermore, most of these upper-income earners are the owners of small businesses, which simply calibrate proposed taxes in terms of money not available to hire employees and buy equipment. In contrast, the president assumes that a hardware-store owner or a small manufacturer already concedes that he makes too much money. The idea seems to be that, in penance, he will cut his profit margin and, for the public good, will gladly pay more of what profits remain to an Ivy League technocracy that knows far better than he how to spend his ill-gotten revenue on others more deserving....