I'm Already Paying "My Share" Ms. Warren-And More
A video from Elizabeth Warren’s campaign tour in Massachusetts, has been circulating online. In it she justifies on moral grounds the need to raise taxes on “the rich”.
As her thin platform from which to launch a tax-the-rich clarion call, she refers to a hypothetical factory owner who must use roads "the rest of us paid for" utilizing workers educated in schools “the rest of us paid for” and whose workplaces are protected by police “the rest of us paid for.”
Hold it! If that factory is in my state of New Jersey, the odds are that the owner in 2010 paid around 50 cents of every dollar he earned last year over to some form of government (in federal, state, or local property taxes, FICA, etc.) so I humbly submit his application to be a member of her fabled “the rest of us.”
The odds are that 50% of “the rest of us” did not pay any manner of federal income tax at all last year. Others paid for the roadways mostly as they used them via tolls, gasoline taxes, and other user fees and local taxes. They probably were useful for everyone and not just her hypothetical factory owner.
As for the schools, well my property taxes, from which a large part go to pay for our schools, are in the five figures annually so I guarantee you I am with "the rest of us" she refers to in this category as well.
And what of those police that “the rest of us” paid for? Again, I really wish she’d check out my tax returns before making such a crass statement. Still, as a conservative I have no problem paying taxes to "provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity" so I am not sure towards who her admonishments are even aimed other than a fringe hard-core purist libertarian movement of the GOP.
In fact (and this may come a shock to Ms. Warren) those who are actually bearing the brunt of the income tax burden in the country – that evil top 10% who cover 70% of the federal income tax tab (not the other 50% "rest of us" who actually pay zero in federal income tax) – are not opposed to the concept of taxation at all.
They tend to understand that the highways they drive on while F-16s fly top-cover don't come for free. It is indeed, part of the social compact to pay one’s "fair share." But whose definition of “fair share” then?
Therein lies the rub. Ask any liberal what exactly constitutes "fair share" and they will swiftly change the subject. In reality they have no clue themselves. Ms. Warren commends her hypothetical industrialist but then announces that he should keep, in her words, “a chunk” of what he makes. But how big of a chunk should it be?
What, exactly, does Ms. Warren believe one’s “fair share” to be? I mean, since I am not paying “enough” then she must have some idea of what is enough in order to make such a quantitative statement. So what is it then? What percent of my income (let’s call it X) does Ms. Warren decree that I should do without for the greater good? And how did she solve for X? And why is X -1% too little, but X +1% too much. What empirical data did she use? What methodology? And while we’re at it, why is $251,000 year in Manhattan where a two-bedroom apartment in Harlem starts at $2,400/month “rich” yet one who makes $249,000/year in Little Rock, where that same apartment rents $700/mo, not “rich”?
Good luck getting any of them to answer. Perhaps they have the same test as Potter Stewart did for pornography when it comes to identifying that elusive “fair share” level: they cannot define it, but know it when the see it.
Until liberal politicians can tell me in firm and tangible numbers what that “chunk” I owe the state should be, they have nothing worth saying that is anything but the very class warfare nonsense that people like Ms. Warren so mendaciously claim to be disparaging.
A final note, Ms. Warren emphatically declares that no one got rich “on his own.” She’s right, we do not sell products to ourselves after all. But, Ms. Warren, we do often take tremendous risks that most others (whose jobs we then provide) are unwilling to take upon themselves, often with our personal finances pledged to start our own business.
No bank will give a small business a loan without a personal guarantee in this day and age. How many in this world are willing to take so great a chance on their vision as to risk so much of what they have to brave the unknown? It is said that an entrepreneur will work 18 hours a day for him/herself so they do not have to work eight hours for someone else. Such effort, and the risks that attend them, should entail greater reward.
It should at least include equal access to the highways we pay for as much as “the rest of us” do, if not more so.
