Uncivil Rights

These are excerpts from an Op-ed piece from truthout.org (a left-wing, liberal website). You can view the article in its entirety here, http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/112104J.shtml.


If you thought the current Bush tax rate rewarded the wealthy, wait until you get a load of his administration's latest plan.

I don’t believe tax rates reward anyone. Consider this: 20% of $50,000 is $10,000, 20% of $1,000,000 is $200,000. Someone making $1 million will pay 20 times the taxes that someone making $50K pays if the same rate applied. To make things EVEN, either the $50K person pays 400% of their salary or the person making $1 million pays tax at a rate of 1%. It concerns me that the liberals continually foster and incite class warfare with the tax argument.

Was the White House really suggesting eliminating incentives for employers to offer their employees health insurance plans? Was it really proposing to shift the country's tax burden even further onto states that didn't vote for Bush, like New York and Massachusetts?

Incentives? Do they mean the government was allowing the companies to KEEP more of their own money? Shift the tax burden to states that didn’t vote for Bush? As I recall, it was the major metropolitan areas that voted for Kerry, not entire states. It also occurred to me that if the government were receiving less in tax money than it should be planning on spending less, NOT looking for other streams of REVENUE.

the Bush administration "plans to push major amendments that would shield interest, dividends and capital gains from taxation, expand tax breaks for business investment and take other steps intended to simplify the system and encourage economic growth."

Is this saying the government is willing to allow people to keep more of their own money? What a novel concept, yet the liberals are portraying this as bad. Lowering the tax burden on companies and investors WOULD encourage growth.

The plan would further shift the tax burden off of people whose money comes from interest and investments - the very rich - a prospect that liberals find disheartening but not surprising.

I never realized that average people were not allowed to invest. Again, shifting the tax burden seems to be a running theme with liberals. What if the government just curbed their prolific spending to coincide with less collected taxes? Is this a novel concept?

But what really caught financial experts' attention was the next paragraph, which explained how Bush intended to pay for these tax cuts.

This is what concerns me the most. The liberals believe the money is the property of the government. This is a socialistic/communistic philosophy. The money belongs to the taxpayer. There is no such thing as “paying for tax cuts.” That concept is illogical and can only be thought of in relation to communistic ideals.

the Post explained. "To pay for them, the administration is considering eliminating the deduction of state and local taxes on federal income tax returns and scrapping the business tax deduction for employer-provided health insurance, the advisers said."

This excerpt shows that the author is making the conclusion that the government must pay for tax cuts. The author is of course a liberal and is espousing the communistic philosophical views that runs rampant among liberals.

If such policies move forward, says John Irons, associate director for tax and budget policy at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, "You'll see an economy that benefits only the very few at the very top. People in the middle will be squeezed, people in the low end won't be helped at all."

First of all, “liberal think tank” is oxymoronic. Mr. Irons makes assertions that have no logical foundations. How can an economy ONLY benefit a very few at the top? A strong economy benefits everyone. How will the middle be squeezed and low end people not helped? I hate to break another liberal myth, but people are not stuck in the socioeconomic level they are born in; they can move up or down depending on the decisions they make, and how hard they want to work.

The first part of the plan - which would get rid of federal tax deductions for state and local income tax - would fall disproportionately hard on Democratic-voting states, which already pay more in taxes than they receive from the federal government.

Why do Democratic voting states pay more in taxes? Could it be due to the metropolitan areas that actually vote democratic? Could it be that in these metropolitan areas there is more federal funding for social programs such as public housing? Is this a fault of the republican voting states?

Experts say the second part, which would do away with the tax deduction granted to employers for providing health insurance, would likely throw millions of people out of group plans, forcing them to buy far more expensive individual insurance. Right now, employers get a tax break for offering health insurance plans to their employees. Take that away, and there would be no reason for many companies to bother. "Something like 52 percent of everyone who has health insurance has it through their employer." Without the tax benefit, he says, "I would expect a ton of companies to drop health insurance altogether. And that would throw their employees out on the mercy of the market." Of course, people who get health insurance through their companies have to pay for it, generally through payroll deductions, and presumably, if companies no longer offered health benefits, employees would see increases in their paychecks.

That would be the free market at work without government intervention. Health care is not a right. However, private businesses can use the offer of health care to attract the best employees. I would rather trust the free market than the government. Of course the employees and the consumers pay the employee’s health care. Eliminating the tax would increase employee’s paycheck and decrease the price of the business’s goods or services.

But that doesn't mean they could just go out and buy health insurance on their own, as anyone who has ever tried to buy coverage understands. Individual health insurance is far more expensive than group plans, and individuals have less power to negotiate. "People would be tossed out of these group plans and they'd have to fend for themselves, and it would be prohibitive," says Sawicky, who works at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. "They'd have to take [a policy] much more narrowly focused on catastrophic coverage and they'd have to pay much more out of pocket." Health insurance companies, he says, "would make more selling to individuals. Not that they're not making any money now, they'd just like to make more."

Wow, another admission of the liberal and socialistic philosophy, scorning businesses for making a profit. Liberals love to lament about profits. It is more proof that liberals do not have a clue about running a business and would rather leave everything to the government.

Why? Because these state and local income taxes are highest in such blue states as New York, Massachusetts and California, says Press. Manhattan also has an income tax. State taxes are lowest in the red states, which provide fewer services. Texas and Florida have no income tax at all.

I think this says it all. The metropolitan areas are in the blue states. The metropolitan areas have more people on social programs than the red states. The metropolitan areas also have a higher standard of living than the rural areas and hence have higher wage earnings. Therefore, it makes sense that these areas are taxed more. It has nothing to do with “punishing” the blue states. It is simple logic and economics.

Right now, people who itemize their tax returns - about 30 percent of taxpayers, according to Sawicky - can write off the money they pay in local taxes, thus reducing their federal taxes. "If you're in New York and you're a high-income person, you pay more state income tax, but the blow is less severe because you can deduct it," says Sawicky. "So in effect the price of your state income tax has been reduced. If you pay a dollar in state income tax and you're in the 35 percent bracket, you can deduct $.35, so in effect your state income tax is only costing you $.65 on the dollar." "If you take away those deductions, you're in reality increasing the taxes on high-taxing, generally blue states," says Press.

So let me get this straight. If you can’t deduct your state taxes on your federal income tax statement, then you’ll actually have to pay those taxes…hmmm… Perhaps then, your federal income taxes can be reduced overall since the federal government will no longer be subsidizing the state taxes. Very interesting. Liberals are so wanton to pay more taxes, yet they don’t care to pay their rate for state tax.

Because this proposal would increase the sting of state income taxes, it would make it harder for states and cities to raise their taxes and build up state programs like childcare and health insurance. It would allow small-government conservatives to exert their influence on blue-state social policy. "If you take away the deduction for state income taxes, their logic is that you'll force government to be smaller," says Press.

Here is more of the liberal socialism at work. Child care and health care are not rights and should not be subsidized for those who won’t by those that do. This is just a reiteration of income re-distribution.

Sawicky, for one, doesn't actually expect these provisions to pass. He sees them as "bogeymen" - bargaining chips that can be scrapped in the fight to push forward the administration's real agenda: lowering taxes on the wealthy. The new deductions, says Sawicky, could allow the administration to say that it has a plan for paying for its tax cuts, "but I don't think they're very serious."

EGAD! LOWER TAXES ON THOSE THAT PAY THE MOST! ARE THEY MAD? No just smart economics for a free society. Again the “paying for the tax cuts” bit. The socialism philosophy by the Democratic Party will bring this economy to its knees someday.

"The more general problem is the administration's policy, which is to blow holes in the tax system and let the deficit go to hell." He expects this to lead to a financial crisis that will force the government to slash social programs - what right-wing operative Grover Norquist calls the "starve the beast" strategy.

Social programs should be the last consideration for a federal government funding. It is income re-distribution or socialism.

So is the Bush administration truly pushing a system in which someone who lives off interest and dividends - say, Paris Hilton - would pay less tax than the person who cleans her bathroom? "Yes," Press says.

Another liberal myth. She may pay less percentage, but as shown above, would still pay far more money than the one cleaning her bathroom.

Irons explains it this way: "I was recently at the Treasury Department, where they were talking about eliminating the estate tax. The attitude was very much, 'Why doesn't everyone realize that we're the ones who create the jobs? Why doesn't everyone realize that it's us, the super-rich that drive the economy?'" He continues: "The attitude is that everyone who is working 40 hours a week doing an average job at a construction site, or is a store clerk, or me sitting in an office doing economic analysis, is feeding off the people who are the real successes. The attitude is that the economy should be geared to benefit the people who are business owners, who are rich, who are giving us the benefit of jobs. That's what you really see in the tax code."

I have never even been offered a job by someone that was poor or could not afford my services. The businesses and corporations do drive this economy by supplying jobs, and then the employee makes money to spend which further drives the economy. Communistic countries do not have growing economies; they are stagnating and eventually die. History tells us that much.