I’ve been listening to my
Republican brethren for the last week, since Paul Ryan was put on the national
ticket as Vice-President. It’s got me so mad at the current administration that
I think I’m losing weight, losing hair and losing my way. You won’t believe
what I’m hearing.
Do you know that President Obama
cut over 700 million dollars from the Medicare budget? Worse yet, do you know
what he did with the money? It seems that the administration cut Medicare to give
the money to Obamacare. Can you believe that? They moved money that was
dedicated to helping people pay medical bills and redirected it to the
healthcare system. What is the President thinking of and what kind of man is
he?
This administration just doesn’t
understand how to direct government funds for the benefit of Americans.
Vice-Presidential candidate Paul Ryan, the budget guru, knows what America and
Americans need. He knows that redirecting funds that were aimed at Medicare to
some healthcare initiative is just preposterous. We need to redirect those
funds to the job creators. We need to give tax breaks to folks earning a
quarter of million dollars a year and more because they know what to do with
the money. They know, like candidate Romney knows, that funding Swiss bank accounts
and investing in other off shore accounts does not come cheap.
Do you know there are record
amounts of cash on the balance sheets of American corporations? These
corporations are holding all that cash while Average Joe Citizen (AJC) wants
them to spend the money hiring people to do more work, with some obscure notion
to make the corporations even more profitable. AJC doesn’t understand why the
corporations won’t do that. Let me explain.
These corporations can’t spend
all that money until they understand where it will be legal to hide it. They
don’t want to break our laws. That’s why the tax system needs to be clarified.
Once the administration makes it apparent how much taxes and what their commitment
will be, the corporations will know how they can hide their money legally. Then
they can take those record sums of money off the balance sheets, putting it to
work making more money. If AJC understood economics, he would understand that.
Some of you, along with AJC, may
not understand how the national economy works either. Let me try to use my BA in
Economics to illuminate the subject. If we take the 150 million people in this
country at the bottom half of the economic ladder, then charge them more in
taxes, that won’t change their economic situation. They were poor before they
were charged more taxes and they will be poor after they are charged more
taxes. There will be no change.
Now consider the three million
plus millionaires in the United States. If we hit them with new taxes, big
taxes, then we affect the delicate economic balance of the economy. The nation
would take the chance of adding more people to the already growing number of
poor in this country. If we decrease the number of rich people by making some
of them poor, we will change the demographics. There will be more poor in the
bottom half than when we started. That’s why we can’t tax the millionaires
more.
Let me give you a more concrete
example. In all the years…well…in the two years of tax returns released by
Candidate Romney, there is roughly 20 million dollars in income in each year. The taxes paid
were about 14% which is about 2.8 million dollars. That leaves the Romney
family just over 17 million dollars of income for their lifestyle expenses.
Then Mitt Willard claimed he gave 10% of the income to charities, which
was another 2 million dollars. That leaves them just over 15 million dollars
for the family’s discretionary spending that year. Also realize that Candidate
Romney has five children and 18 grandchildren whom I assume he supports with
all that cash.
Now if we raise the taxes on the
Romney family to 30%, that means they will have to pay six million dollars in
taxes. Add that to the 2 million dollars they give to charity, that’s an eight
million dollar bite out of their annual income. It will take Granpa Mitt
another 52 weeks to make that much money again and it would only leave them a
mere 12 million dollars to take care of themselves for that whole year. That’s only about $200,000
per week after taxes and charitable contributions.
However, when they only pay 14%
in taxes, they make almost $300,000 per week. That gives them about $100,000
more per week to fund those 23 off spring, not to mention their Swiss bank
account, their 100 million dollar IRA and whatever accounts they have in the Bahamas.
Realize also that the Romneys
earned all that money. They had to fire a lot of people to accumulate that kind
of wealth. We can’t expect the government to make the tax rate more level now;
to what end? The Romney family shouldn’t be forced to pay the same percentage
of taxes that the poor pay simply to make it fair.
That’s not the America I grew up
in. The America I grew up in didn’t treat men and women the same. The America I
grew up in didn’t treat the races the same. The America I grew up in didn’t
level the playing field for some fairness fantasy. Now all of a sudden we want
to be fair?
Fairness takes time. Fairness
needs to be studied. We need to understand if there are other unintended
consequences of fairness, such as fairness being unfair. If this country is
going to go all crazy trying to be fair, then the fairness needs to be fair.
And from my experience, the American standard of fairness isn’t intended to be
fair at all. Why should it be? That wouldn’t be fair!
Wait a minute. Yes it would.
Nevermind.
