Back when I was serving in the Virginia General Assembly, I was a strong proponent of property rights. Your wallet is your property and the money in it. There’s no right for anyone to deprive you of either. Unlike some extreme liberal views, I don’t think that my money is owned by some collective who decides how much of it I can keep. I do subscribe to the need for fair taxation. That ought to be about 10 percent in total. And everyone should have to pay that amount, whether a millionaire or a foodservice employee. We are, after all, equal to one another in the eyes of the law and should also be treated the same by the tax collector.
That said, I sat on the Finance Committee and the Appropriations Committee in the Virginia House of Delegates for many years. So, I know both ends of the money deal in government, both the tax law side and how money is spent by the government. And if there are two common conditions at both the Federal and State levels, it’s that (1) we’re overtaxed and (2) our government overspends. We are in the age of “benefits’ whereby the government is seen as a cradle-to-grave ATM machine that dispenses money to people who never earned it. Our national motto has transmuted from e pluribus unum (out of many one), to Ego venio ad me (I have it coming to me). The Welfare State has become the Robber State.
In 1976, Margaret Thatcher, who was the British Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990 summed up the tax and spend addiction of socialists quite well.
“The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”
The socialist mindset has utterly no considerations for the earners whose money they are spending. They think it’s theirs. But if you’ve taken a look recently at our national debt, it’s a mind-numbing $35 Trillion. (I’d write that out, but I’d run out of zeros on my keyboard!) Clearly, they also think the money is unlimited. It is as long as we have printing presses. But in time our economy will collapse on the heads of our grandchildren, and they will have us to blame. Right now, if the national debt were divided up by the number of individual US citizens, each would owe $104,000 to pay it off. But taxpayers—the 47 percent of people who actually pay taxes—owe $268,000 toward the debt. We truly need a balanced budget amendment to the US Constitution.
So, what is planned for our future? The now-Democrat Presidential nominee Kamala Harris has decided that we simply do not pay enough taxes. Consider her nearly $5 trillion in tax increases over the next decade.
First, she wants to raise the corporate tax rate to 28 percent from 21 percent, once again making US corporate rates near the top worldwide. Of course that will lead to corporations moving jobs overseas. Not smart.
Second, she wants to raise the top marginal income rate to 39.6 percent, up from 37 percent. On top of that, she would also increase the rate on two parallel Medicare surtaxes to 5 percent from 3.8 percent for Americans making more than $400,000 and expand the income subject to one of them. But if you don’t think that will open the door to lower brackets, you truly have no appreciation for the appetite of liberal spenders when it comes to taxation.
Third, she wants to give all new homebuyers $25,000 toward purchasing a home. And you can be sure that when she does, every house on the market will go up by, you guessed it, $25,000. It’s as if she never took Economics 101.
Finally, she wants to tax people—like Elon Musk—with more than $100 million in wealth to pay at least 25 percent on the combination of their income and their “unrealized capital gains,” the value of the appreciation in investments and other assets that they own but haven’t sold. No problem. Only the rich will pay, until the liberals eventually include your 401K retirement savings.
Meanwhile, grocery prices have risen 21 percent since the Biden administration first took office. Gasoline prices remain high. So, Harris wants to cap prices. It’s been tried in the past and has failed miserably. It will again. Jason Furman, a top economist in the Obama administration, even opposes her anti-price gouging scheme saying, “This is not sensible policy.” Samuel Gregg, with the American Institute for Economic Research said of price controls, “This is economic lunacy.”
I have an idea that’s better than Harris’s tax and spend approach. Let’s create a flat tax, pass a balanced budget amendment, and instead of capping food prices, cap the number of total votes for Harris to, say, 25,000.
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