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It's September, and election season is under way. Marching to the tune of President Obama's class-based political rhetoric, some candidates for Congress are campaigning on promises to raise taxes significantly on electorally safe targets.
This year's list of victims includes "the rich," Wall Street and America's oil companies.
Those three groups are in Washington's cross hairs because politicians need ways to generate more revenue — without spoiling their chances at the polls — to pay for the spending spree they have been on since at least the administration of George W. Bush.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, baseline federal outlays have risen by $4.4 trillion (yes, trillion!) in just the past 31 months.
Demonizing Wealth
The rich and Wall Street are both easy targets. Wealth sparks images of Hollywood and corporate excess. Paris Hilton and Bernie Madoff, like Marie Antoinette, would probably advise us to eat cake. In contrast, most Americans cheer genuine economic achievement.
Individual tales of riches based on hard work and innovation rarely make headlines, however.
So when we hear that Washington is considering allowing the Bush-era tax cuts to expire at year-end, raising the burden on households earning more than $250,000, many think: "Why not?"
But the evidence shows that the top 5% of earners now contribute over 50% of the total income taxes collected by the IRS.
Households reporting incomes exceeding $1 million also contribute more than half of all the money donated to charitable organizations.
Moreover, those same rich Americans often start or run the companies that fuel economic growth. We love a good "Horatio Alger" story — individuals willing to take risks, start new businesses, create employment opportunities and reap profits if they succeed. The process is admired, but Washington now wants to punish the results.
America's oil and gas industry is another political punching-bag, dating back to the Carter administration and before, bolstered by the recent Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Unwilling to break with Beltway tradition, the 111th Congress proposes adding to Big Oil's tax burden by, among other things, disallowing deductions for income taxes paid to foreign governments.
Despite already being saddled with an effective corporate income tax rate of 48.4%, in consequence paying more into the Treasury than they earn per dollar of sales, America's oil and gas companies add at least $1 trillion to U.S. GDP and employ over 9 million workers.
The oil and gas industry's challenge is to extract natural resources in sufficient amounts, and cheaply enough, to be able to profitably supply affordable energy, which is a critical input to almost all economic activity. That is a risky and very expensive undertaking, but one which is no more profitable than the average private business enterprise.
'There will be zero tolerance for this type of misinformation and unjustified rate increases." That sounds like a stern headmistress dressing down some sophomores who have been misbehaving. But it's actually from a letter sent last Thursday from Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius ...
The Democrats will probably suffer historic losses in both the House and Senate in less than 60 days. The 11th-hour campaigning of the now-unpopular Barack Obama on behalf of endangered congressional candidates will not change much. In fact, most embattled Democratic candidates don't want the ...
Americans, says Time magazine, are too dumb to appreciate the wonders of President Obama's $787 billion "stimulus" package. Gobsmacked by polls that show Americans don't believe government is smart enough to take money from taxpayers and give it to those it considers deserving, Time says: Voters ...
While the administration of Barack Obama attempts to portray the Tea Party as a "fringe" movement that doesn't share America's "mainstream" values, it is working concurrently to erase many of these values from our society. Lurking beneath the unconstitutional mandates of "ObamaCare," the reckless ...
President Obama boldly proclaims, "The buck stops here!" But, whenever his policies are criticized, he acts as if the buck stopped with George W. Bush. The party line that we are likely to be hearing from now until the November elections is that Obama "inherited" the big federal budget deficits and ...
Posted By: BaltimoreJoe(2515) on 9/15/2010 | 1:18 PM ET
That the Bush tax cuts cost over $3 trillion is a grand delusion. The government's revenues rose 35% in the 3 years after the Bush tax cuts. They didn't cost anything. They boosted the economy and thus revenues.
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