Accelerate

With all the talk of the fiscal cliff and what needs to be done to avoid it, all I have to say is let’s go off it. President Obama and liberals everywhere want tax increases on those who already pay 40%+ of all Federal income taxes despite earning only 17% of income but I say tax everyone. Typically I’m adamantly against tax increases, but since the election I’ve become vindictive. If so many people want to keep the gravy train rolling, they can pay for it. The rich pay for more government that they use and don’t qualify for much, if any, of the social services they pay for via their Federal income taxes, yet they are demonized for not doing more by the very people they subsidize. These people pay little to nothing already in terms of Federal income taxes and receive more in benefits than they ever paid in.

If we want to talk about fairness, why don’t these people pay anything to help offset all that they receive? They have no skin in the game. With no skin in the game, it’s easy to say that someone else should pay more. I say we go off the fiscal cliff, that we raise taxes on everyone so everyone else can feel the pain. That’s fairness. During the campaign all we heard was how great we had it during the Clinton years when taxes on EVERYONE were higher. If that’s the case, why don’t we want to raise taxes on everyone? I’m sick of those who feel like they’re entitled to the fruits of other’s labor. How perverse has this nation become when that is defined as “fair”?

I’ll be perfectly honest, I want the cuts to hit and the taxes to go up right now. It’ll hurt everyone, including Americans who have done the right thing, who have been fiscally responsible, but this is what we need to teach the looters lessons in fairness and economics. Sadly,  Congressional Republicans will cave like they always do. Hell, a number of them have already come out saying that they’ll violate their pledge on not raising taxes before the Democrats have offered anything up. These tax increases will do nothing to fix our deficit or fixing our long-term entitlement obligations. It isn’t a tax problem; it’s a spending problem. The Buffett tax would raise about $4 billion extra a year, or enough to pay off the FY11 deficit in just over 500 years. If we let the tax increases hit only the rich, we’ll bring in about an extra $80 billion a year, not even 10% of our projected deficit. Those figures are from static analysis as well and I bet they’ll actually be lower because there will be less investment and those people will work or invest less, find tax shelters, or move assets and investments to tax friendly areas. If you don’t believe me look at how much wealth has moved out of high tax states like New York, New Jersey, California, and Maryland. Tax policy has consequences, something liberals don’t understand.

I’ve become an Ayn Rand devotee in recent years and I want Atlas to shrug. Now is a perfect time. Let’s accelerate right off that cliff. It’s time to teach the looters a lesson.