Tax The Rich!!
We need well-educated citizens in order to make reasonable decisions. That is one of the reasons why I am such a severe critic of public education: it fails to produce citizens who can look at data and draw logical conclusions. (This generally results in other people voting to raise my taxes.) What is truly disturbing is that our president, who, I am told, attended private schools, appears to be very poorly educated.
Case in point: the presidential budget address at George Washington University on April 13, 2011. Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin has provided a budget for fiscal year 2012 that addresses the reality of our financial situation. It also incorporates the wisdom we have learned over the years: that tax increases during economic recoveries are suicidal, and that they generally fail to raise additional revenue. No matter where you stand on the issue of tax increases versus spending cuts, the Ryan budget is realistic, realistic to the point of forcing painful spending choices regarding the cherished Medicare entitlement.
Mr. Obama disagrees with Mr. Ryan as to the level of spending reductions required. His preference is to raise taxes, not on you and me, of course, but on "the rich." We soon discover that we are "the rich."
And a firm grasp of 5th grade arithmetic indicates that soaking "the rich" will not solve this problem. I am indebted to the Wall Street Journal for its April 14, 2011 editorial entitled The Presidential Divider, which contains useful IRS data from the most recent year available, 2008.
Here are the numbers. Mr. Obama's budget, the one he introduced in February for fiscal year 2012, will result in a deficit of $1.65 trillion dollars, or $1,650,000,000,000.00. By "deficit" he means that, in fiscal year 2012, the government will spend $3.73 trillion, but bring in revenues of only $2.08 trillion. We will thus spend $1.65 trillion dollars that we borrow from the Chinese.
For some perspective, there are 60 seconds per minute, 3600 seconds per hour, 86,400 seconds in a day, and multiplying that figure by 365 gives us 31,536,000 (31.536 million) seconds in a year. Which means that we will be borrowing $52,321.16 from the Chinese every second of the year.
So, according to Mr. Obama, we spend $1.65 trillion more than we take in. Let's see if we can fix that with a tax increase on "the rich."
First, I have to define "the rich" to include some very un-rich people. Let's say that you are rich when you earn $100,000 or more per year. Now, if you earn $100,000 per year, you already know that you are not rich. But go along with me for a minute.
According to Wall Street Journal editorial mentioned above, "the entire taxable income of everyone earning over $100,000 in 2008 was about $1.582 trillion. Even if all these Americans - most of whom are far from wealthy - were taxed at 100%, it wouldn't cover Mr. Obama's deficit for this year."
I am left to conclude that the only way to get control of this budget mess is to cut spending and to do everything possible to encourage economic growth. Only then will we succeed.
Which leads me to the question of the day: why doesn't Mr. Obama know this? Is he a victim of a shoddy, public school education? There is a small group of nuts who obsess over whether Mr. Obama was born in Kenya or Hawaii. Who cares? I've never heard anyone question the fact that Mr. Obama's mother was a United States citizen, and in my book, that makes Mr. Obama a natural born citizen, even if he were born on the planet Vulcan. What I want to see is his high school diploma. Did he really graduate from a posh private school? Impossible! Given the knuckle-headed thinking he displayed in his George Washington University speech, it is clear to me that he is a poseur.
Mr. President, show me your high school diploma!!!