The Looting Liberals Are Back - Look Over Your Shoulder
By Joel Turtel (02/24/07)
Looting The Rich With High Taxes Will Backfire On The Middle Class - Already the liberal-democrat Presidential candidates are showing their lust to loot "the rich" to pay for more big government. John Edwards wants to increase taxes on the rich to pay for socialized medicine. Hillary Clinton also lusts for socialized medicine. She is also setting her sights on the "greedy" oil companies. She said in a recent speech, "I want to take those [oil company] profits and put them into an alternative energy fund that will begin to fund alternative smart energy alternatives that will actually begin to move us toward the direction of independence."
Notice the word “take,” as in loot or steal from oil companies through confiscatory taxes. I’m sure millions of oil-company shareholders will appreciate government simply stealing their company’s profits in the liberal’s version of the “land of the free.”
What’s the moral premise here?—that government has the right to loot “the rich” to help the not-rich or middle class. It is the sick communist notion of “from each according to his ability to each according to his need.”
Do “rich” people have a moral duty to submit to this legalized theft? Will the middle-class benefit from this looting? No, they will not. If you are middle-class, look over your shoulder, because the same government looters will soon come after you.
If it’s true that helping others is a moral duty rather than a personal choice, then it’s reasonable to loot the rich. They have more money and therefore should “give” their money to people who have less. But progressive income taxes hurt the middle class more than the rich. The middle class is the bulk of our population, and they pay most of the taxes.
To balance the budget on the backs of the top-earning two percent of Americans, we would have to tax 100 percent of the income of everyone who made over $300,000 a year. If this outright expropriation is too extreme even for liberals, we would have to double the income taxes of households earning over $85,000 a year.
Stealing from “the rich” won’t prop up our exploding welfare-entitlement state much longer. But it does satisfy liberals’ secret desire to punish people who are rich. It helps satisfy that green monster called envy. The progressive income tax rears it’s ugly head from liberals’ malicious envy and their desire to feel morally superior, with other people’s money.
Middle-income taxpayers might think the progressive income tax gets them something for nothing. But looting the rich only sets them up for slaughter by the same scheme. Why? Because everyone below the middle class on the economic totem pole will be looting them.
To poor people, the middle class seems rich, though the middle class is struggling to keep its head above water. Since only about two percent of taxpayers make over $300,000 a year (my arbitrary definition of rich), welfare-entitlement beneficiaries (including big farmers and corporations who get subsidies) have to knock on the middle class’s door for their “benefits.” After the rich, the middle class is next in line for the guillotine because it pays almost 80 percent of the taxes that support the welfare-entitlement State.
If you’re middle class and support higher income taxes for the rich, look over your shoulder. Someone poorer than you is breathing down your neck. If you support government’s right to loot the rich, you support government’s right to loot you. You can’t have your cake and eat it too—either we respect each other’s rights and property, or government loots us all in the end. Once government loots one person’s property with progressive income taxes, then we all become victims in the end.
You may think that looting the rich is moral because we have a duty to help others less fortunate than us. But if you believe this, you become vulnerable to the liberals’ propaganda. Your conscience shames you into helping others.
However, if you were consistent, you would feel morally obligated to give all your surplus income to the poor. You would feel immoral spending money on your children’s future while people are starving in Appalachia. Too bad that your kids can’t go to college now after you give all your money away.
But “compassion” can’t stop there. Many poor people in America are rich by comparison to the poor in underdeveloped countries. Mexican illegal aliens who sneak across the Rio Grande at night to work for minimum wages in the fields of California know this. If helping others is a moral duty (forced down out throats by tax collectors), it would be immoral to stop at America’s borders. We would then have to tax America’s poor to feed the rest of the world. After all, America’s poor are rich compared to millions of starving people in Africa.
So there’s no end to it. If giving to those “in need” is our moral and political duty, then no one has a right to one penny of extra income or savings while another human being is worse off than we are. Each of us would be morally and financially responsible for human suffering in every miserable hellhole on Earth.
But if you believe that your life and paycheck are not other people’s property, then the progressive income tax is a moral obscenity.
The progressive income tax becomes a burden and a punishment you don’t deserve and shouldn’t tolerate.
To reject the welfare-entitlement State, and the liberal looters who demand your hard-earned money, ask yourself these questions:
Why is helping others a moral and political duty, instead of a personal choice? Why should government rob you for the sake of others? Why is their life more important than yours? Does government have the right to punish you because you work hard and are successful? Do your elected “representatives,” whose salary you pay, have the right to turn you into a sacrificial animal?
If you think that looting the rich is moral and “practical,” look over your shoulder.
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