Posts Tagged ‘taxes’
Taxing the Rich Won’t Help
Oct11
By John Feehery
President Obama has made taxing the rich the centerpiece of his reelection campaign. He talks incessantly about it. It is a key part of his jobs package. So far, an apt summary of the Obama presidency might very well be: “He killed Osama bin Laden and he really, really wanted to tax the rich.”
The President is no dummy. He reads polls like any other politician, and he knows that the taxing-the-rich meme polls well. Most polls show about 70 percent of all Americans supporting higher taxes on wealthier Americans.
In fact, polls show that even wealthier Americans support higher taxes on wealthier Americans. One commissioned by American Express showed that nearly two-thirds of voters making more than $100,0000 support raising taxes on rich people. A CBS poll shows that 65 percent of voters specifically supported a millionaire’s tax, with only 30 percent opposing it.
You would think that the President would be making up some ground with voters because of his pleas to raise taxes on those rich suckers, but the more Obama attacks the rich, the more his poll numbers go down.
Why is that? Here are a few reasons:
1. It won’t work: Raising taxes now is just plain stupid, and the voters get that fact. People want jobs, not redistribution, and it is established fact in the mind of most voters that higher taxes will lead to fewer jobs. The president can’t argue on one hand that we need to create jobs while arguing on the other that we need to take more money from job creators.
2. Obama is suspect: In the 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt could get away with demanding that the rich pay more. He was a proud member of the elite set. He could lambaste the greedy bastards who populated Wall Street, because his family was among them. FDR posed as a populist, but he was not really a populist, and most voters knew that. When Obama demands that the rich pay more, he sounds and looks a lot like Hugo Chavez. FDR? Not so much.
3. To pay for what? The higher taxes that Obama is demanding will lead not to a balanced budget or to private-sector growth, but to bigger government and more intrusion into our daily lives. How do we know that? Because that is exactly what happened in the president’s first two years. A failed stimulus, regulations out the yin-yang and more individual mandates are all most voters have seen from this White House, and they don’t want it anymore. We live in a small-government moment, and raising taxes simply doesn’t fit that moment.
4. Confirming a stereotype: The President isn’t getting much traction with his anti-rich rhetoric because that is exactly what people expect from him. There is nothing interesting here. It is exactly what you would expect from a very left-wing Chicago politician. This is exactly what they do. By blaming the rich for all of the ills in society, Obama is simply confirming every stereotype held by conservative and moderate voters. By saying what people expect him the say, the president can’t hope to win converts and move the debate forward.
If the President wants to be successful in getting rich people to pay more taxes, he should be doing the following three things:
1. Call for shared sacrifice: Instead of making only the wealthy pay, he should insist that we are all in this together and we all have to pay a little bit more to help solve our debt problems. Shared sacrifice is far more powerful than soaking the rich.
2. Push for real spending cuts: People don’t want to pay for bigger government. They just don’t want more government in their lives. The president won’t get the tax increases if they just go for more spending.
3. Set up a lockbox: All additional revenue from new tax increases should go to pay off our national debt. The president should promise that if he gets those tax hikes, he will use the money to pay off the national credit card. That would be change we could all believe in.
Protest
Oct5
By John Feehery
Apparently, Radiohead couldn’t get its schedule straight with the Occupy Wall Street protesters and they didn’t play for the grungy crowd last week. I am not hip enough to know exactly what kind of music the band plays, but I do know that a couple of years ago, the members of the band came up with a brilliant marketing strategy to sell one of its albums. “Pay what you want or pay nothing at all if that is what you want to do.” The band never released how much money it made by letting its fans name their own price, but they chose to not pursue the same strategy for their next album.
Despite the scheduling snafu, Radiohead still has endorsed the protest movement that seems to be gaining strength every day. For example, all of the government employee unions are now on board with Michael Moore and assorted other left-wing radicals to protest the money that Wall Street financiers make every day.
These Wall Street financiers and their other colleagues, known collectively by the collectivists as “the rich” or the “one-percenters”, pay about 30 to 35% of the taxes collected by the Federal government. Having the government employee unions protest against these prodigious tax-payers is somewhat akin to the protesting against the goose because he is not producing golden eggs fast enough.
Before the unions got involved, the rag-tag group of hemp-smoking hippies lacked cleared focus. It is clear, by their signs, that they don’t like capitalism. And, from anecdotal evidence, it is clear many of them would actually rather not work, despite their demands for more jobs. For example, one New York Times columnist reported on how one protester actually quit his job to join the protests because obviously it is far more fun to protest about the lack of jobs then it is to actually work at one.
This point was made dramatically by a front page story in the Old Gray Lady. Farmers in the west (actually all over the country) can’t get Americans to do the job of picking fruit and vegetables. Many of these farmers have tried, but they find that too many Americans simply won’t show up to work because the work is actually somewhat difficult. So, their only choice is to hire Mexicans or other immigrants from central America.
Michael Moore, who memorably protested when he didn’t get paid enough in one of his anti-American documentaries, has done pretty well for himself as one of America’s leading anti-capitalist capitalists, and my guess is that if you survey this crowd of protectors, you will find more than a few trust-funders among the crowd. Only the idle rich really can find the time to protest. The rest of us have to get to work.
