As my previous blurbs from the wall st. journal have come under fire as "ideologically" partisan though the numbers etc. are never disputed regards Obama tax policies as hes laid them out so far, I sought something a totally outside the media mechanism.
The tax foundation,
http://www.taxfoundation.org/ is one of the if not the oldest tax watchdog grps extent, non partisan, non profit that have been watching tax policy since 1937....so their president weighed in with remarks from a study of Obamas plans etc so far. IBD ( Investors biz daily) etc...
To those that feel the below description of how tax policy will be applied and its results are okay, he you are certainly entitled to that opinion, my point is, lets just stop the game playing and call it what it is, period.
A Few To Support The Many
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, July 02, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Taxation: For those who like the politics of redistribution, Sen. Barack Obama is their man. The presumed Democratic presidential nominee's plan would soak the richest Americans and spread the wealth around.
Economist Scott Hodge, president of the Tax Foundation, has looked at the Obama plan and found that it "would redistribute more than $131 billion per year from the top 1% of taxpayers to all other taxpayers."
$131 billion. In one year. That's the value of Intel, bigger than Coca-Cola and just below the market caps of Cisco and ConocoPhillips.
It's enough cash to fund the Education Department for almost two years or the entire Defense Department for nearly three months. And remember, this isn't the overall tax bill for the top 1% of taxpayers — it's just the amount beyond their current taxes that they would have to pay under the Obama plan.
If all that's not alarming enough, then how about this:
"In 2009," Hodge writes, "after the income-shifting in the Obama plan, the top 1% of taxpayers would pay a greater share of the total federal tax burden than the bottom 80% of Americans combined."
Apparently Obama believes it's fair for 1.13 million Americans to pay more to the federal government than, as Hodge notes, "128 million of their fellow citizens combined."
These numbers don't even include Obama's plan for hiking the Social Security tax, which he would apply to income above $250,000 a year, leaving a poorly thought-out, tax-free doughnut on income between $102,000, where the tax currently stops, and $250,000.
With this tax hike figured into the equation, the amount of money redistributed from the top 1% goes up by $40 billion in 2009 "and more than $629 billion over the next ten years."
That $40 billion tax hike alone is twice as much as all the federal taxes paid by the 39 million Americans in the bottom quintile.
We're sure that Obama's camp would address our concerns by pointing out that raising the tax bill for the top 1% eases the tax burden on the rest of America. But that's a superficial rationalization designed to appeal to class envy.
Rather than appeal to emotion, let's look at the facts.
First, increasing the burden on the top taxpayers will not make the poor rich. It will instead make the rich poorer, which hurts low income Americans, as there will be 131 billion fewer dollars in the private sector for investments that create businesses and jobs.
Second, squeezing the federal tax burden onto an ever smaller group is not smart. The Marxist appetite for radically progressive taxation is both unfair and dangerous.
Depending only on a small number of wealthy earners will cause tax revenues to become volatile. The shrunken tax base also will eventually erode — as will the economy itself — as the incentive to become wealthy is killed by government.
Third, the large majority that pays little or no taxes will make excessive demands on the small group that is saddled with the burden because the non- and low-paying group is insulated from the pain.
It sounds so much better, though, for a politician to promise the masses that he will make the rich pay their "fair share" of the taxes.
That's too bad, because this nation was not built on wealth envy but on a freedom-based system that rewards hard work, thrift, ingenuity, preparation and diligence.
If we keep moving away from it, as Obama is advocating, we doom ourselves to a future of perpetual economic struggles.
IBDeditorials.com: Editorials, Political Cartoons, and Polls from Investor's Business Daily -- A Few To Support The Many