PrintSeptember 10, 2010
The 'Rich' Have Another Name: 'Employers'
The LA Times proudly proclaims, "Obama blasts continued tax cuts for the rich!" But every time you hear leftists refer to "the rich," remember that "the rich" are also known by these other terms: employers, investors, the self-reliant, self-starters.
Attacking "the rich" is a direct assault on the people who invest and employ. Hate the rich if you must, but don't force them into poverty or offshore solutions. If you hope to bankrupt the rich, you have only seen the beginning of the economic collapse to come.
From the LA Times article:
President Obama drew a sharp contrast with Republicans Wednesday over what was shaping up as a key issue in the midterm congressional elections: the extension of tax cuts for top earners, which he said were unsustainable.
Obama also drew a sharp contrast with most American citizens. Only 30% of citizens polled agree with Obama, Pelosi, and Reid that employers and investors should be assaulted again by ending Bush tax cuts aimed at promoting economic expansion. On the other hand, 54% say that the Bush tax cuts must remain in place.
According to the LA Times,
... he [Obama] used the debate over Bush-era tax breaks to make a populist pitch, shaping the coming congressional midterm election as a choice between Democrats who support policies to advance the middle class and Republicans who would return to policies that created only "the illusion of prosperity."
However, generally speaking, a populist statement represents the sentiments of the population, or at least a majority of the population. In this case, Obama's economic tax plan represents at best only 30% of Americans.
That's because most Americans are free-market capitalists. They know how the most prosperous and powerful nation on earth was built. They know that even if they envy the rich and famous in the privacy of their own homes, they need investors and employers in order to have any form of real economic expansion, which is possible only in the private sector.
Conversely, had Obama's plan to stimulate jobs via the expansion of public-sector union employment actually worked, we wouldn't be talking about our downtrodden economy anymore. We would be celebrating the huge success story behind unbridled government spending and how Marxists saved the day.
As it is, Obama's economic plan has a once-great nation so debt-strapped that nobody in the world wants to buy our debt anymore. In Obama's voodoo bag of economic tricks, there is no next trick. Obama has pretty much guaranteed every American a soup-line existence in his or her near future.
A return to fiscal sanity is the only cure. Despite Obama's efforts to lay off blame for our current economic pains, even his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is sounding the alarm:
"It [US Debt] poses a national security threat in two ways: it undermines our capacity to act in our own interest, and it does constrain us where constraint may be undesirable."
- Hillary Clinton, Sept. 8, 2010
"Whether one is a Republican or a Democrat, a conservative, a progressive -- whatever you call yourself -- there is no free lunch and we cannot pretend that there is without doing grave harm to our country and to our future generations." - Hillary Clinton, Sept. 8, 2010
Yet it has been proven over and over again that lower taxes result in increased investment, hiring, and productivity, which in turn end in increased tax revenue from an expanding economy.
On the other hand, if the goal is to put every American in a bread line, you have to begin by breaking the backs of the people who create private-sector jobs, aka "the rich."
This might explain why Tri-C students were recruited to fill the seats for Obama's appearance in Ohio today. Nobody wants to hear his whiny rhetoric anymore. Oh, it's all Bush's fault! -- almost two years into the Obama economy, sinking deeper and deeper into all sorts of depression.
If there is a silver lining in this story, it's that Republicans continue to gain ground headed into the midterm elections, hinting that an increasing number of citizens may be snapping out of their history-making euphoria brought on by the opportunity to seat America's first mulatto in the Oval Office, even if he isn't a natural born citizen.
Our federal budget has been balanced only once in the last seventy-plus years, and that was by a Republican Congress during the second Clinton administration.
But according to Reuters, "President Barack Obama, fighting to keep Democrats in charge of Congress, said on Wednesday the United States could not afford to extend Bush-era tax cuts for the rich and accused Republicans of being fiscally irresponsible" -- never mind the $4 trillion in new debt heaped upon unsuspecting citizens by the Obama administration over the last eighteen months, or the trillions more in unfunded promises from Obama and his Democratic Socialist Congress.
Putting Republicans back in charge of the purse-strings isn't the cure-all, though it is clearly a step in the right direction. But God help those Republicans if they act like liberals after this election. The people's patience with all politicians is wearing very thin.
