Wintery Knight notes that The most productive taxpayers flee higher tax rates. Imagine that!
No one seems to question that if you want less of something, you tax it. That’s why we have high taxes on cigarettes. Activists of all stripes are open about their desire to make it too expensive to smoke, and politicians agree. It’s for our own good! And if we insist on smoking, well, we’re going to have to be punished with a tax.
So to the left, it’s win – win – win. Higher taxes, more government control over individual behavior, and the health/environut cabal is appeased. It’s the same for alcohol and every other sin tax. This is all well known and accepted; I’m really pulling a Captain Obvious to write it out like this.
But it’s obviously not just sin taxes, it’s all taxes. When we charge people more to earn money via income taxes, regulations, and similar means, history has proved time and again that people earn less money. Whether that’s by choice, where people like me purposely throttle back our income in order to pay fewer taxes, or by government fiat, where government takes more money from businesses, the bottom line is that productivity goes down and everybody, including the government, gets less money out of the system.
Therefore, there only rational explanation for these taxes is that the goal is not more money for the government. It’s more control for the government. The ability to control, not opportunity, but outcome. That’s the dirty little secret that the media does not publicize, though we are compelled to know about every detail of Republican sex lives each time the opportunity presents itself to discuss it. Obama said plainly during the election that he intended to punish the productive and a relative handful of people on the right went ballistic over it. (But what do we know? We’re racists.) If a Republican said this, the left would be screaming that he was a power-mad control freak. Every disingenuous word would be parsed and widely publicized. No interview would be complete without a reference to this statement. Oh, and the best part is when he says you can’t take out a credit card from “the bank of China.” Enjoy:
He’s getting exactly what he wanted – people are making less money. A falling tide lowers all boats. How’s that “fairness” working out for you?
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