“Tax the rich!” That’s a quote you often hear from people who want the government to provide them everything and also lack a basic understanding of liberty and economics. Every time there is a government deficit in this country the statists scream that we need to tax the rich. Of course they never define nor justify their definition of rich so one is usually lead to believe it means anybody who makes $1.00 more than the screaming statist.
For others the definition of rich is $250,000.00 a year which I never really understood because somebody making that money certainly isn’t rich by my definition (no fancy boat, no private jet, no mansion on beach front property, etc.). Here’s the problem, even if we enact a 100% income tax on everybody making $250,000.00 or more a year it won’t clear up the federal government’s huge deficit:
This year, Congress will spend $3.7 trillion dollars. That turns out to be about $10 billion per day. Can we prey upon the rich to cough up the money? According to IRS statistics, roughly 2 percent of U.S. households have an income of $250,000 and above. By the way, $250,000 per year hardly qualifies one as being rich. It’s not even yacht and Lear jet money. All told, households earning $250,000 and above account for 25 percent, or $1.97 trillion, of the nearly $8 trillion of total household income. If Congress imposed a 100 percent tax, taking all earnings above $250,000 per year, it would yield the princely sum of $1.4 trillion. That would keep the government running for 141 days, but there’s a problem because there are 224 more days left in the year.
Now somebody with a lack of economic sense would come out and say we should tax the corporations (on top of the “rich”). Guess what? It won’t work either:
How about corporate profits to fill the gap? Fortune 500 companies earn nearly $400 billion in profits. Since leftists think profits are little less than theft and greed, Congress might confiscate these ill-gotten gains so that they can be returned to their rightful owners. Taking corporate profits would keep the government running for another 40 days, but that along with confiscating all income above $250,000 would only get us to the end of June. Congress must search elsewhere.
Taxing the “rich” isn’t going to get us out of the mess our government has created. The only option we have is to reduce our spending and that will require politically inconvenient cuts such as military, Medicare, Medicade, and Social Security. We certainly can’t afford to implement Obama’s Health Insurance Company Enrichment Act so that will have to be tossed out as well.
We literally have no other options available to us. We can’t fix this problem with taxation which leads us to look elsewhere and the only other place to look is spending. The United States government is like an idiot teenage kid (as opposed to an intelligent one) who gets his first credit card and don’t realize that money put onto that card will have to be paid back. Eventually they get in over their heads and apply for another credit card to continue their insane spending habits instead of looking at the real problem, their spending, and correcting it.