The left are masters of division. There is absolutely nothing more inciting than telling someone he is getting ripped off and being treated unfairly........... Thomas Sowell sets the record straight, but I'm afraid he is only reaching a small % of American with some common sense.
At the recent televised debate among candidates for the Democrats' nomination for president, Hillary Clinton declared: "The wealthy pay too little" in taxes and "the middle class pays too much."
Some people might wish to argue about whether that is true or not, but no rational argument can be made on either side of this issue, because the words used are completely undefined. Nor is Hillary Clinton the only one who talks this way.
It is one of the signs of the mindlessness of our times that all sorts of people declare that "the rich" are not paying their "fair share" in taxes, without telling us concretely what they mean by either "the rich" or "fair share."
Whether in politics or in the media, words are increasingly used not to convey facts or even allegations of facts, but simply to arouse emotions. Undefined words are a big handicap in logic, but they are a big plus in politics, where the goal is not clarity but victory — and the votes of gullible people count just as much as the votes of people who have common sense.
What a "fair share" of taxes means in practice is simply "more." No matter how high the tax rate is on people with a given income, you can always raise the tax rate further by saying that they are still not paying their "fair share."
Advocates of higher tax rates can get very specific when they want to. A recent article in the New York Times says that raising the tax rate on the top 1% of income earners to 40% would generate "about $157 billion" a year in additional tax revenue for the government.
This calculation ignores mountains of evidence, going back for generations, showing that raising tax rates does not automatically mean raising tax revenues — and has often actually led to falling tax revenues. A fantasy expressed in numbers is still a fantasy.
http://news.investors.com/ibd-edito...s-vague-terms-not-facts-to-push-tax-hikes.htm
A little bit more for the central planning types.
Contrary to the way that some people on the left conceive of the world, neither rich people nor poor people are inert blocks of wood to be moved about like pieces on a chess board in order to carry out some grand design from on high.
Even outright confiscation of people's wealth, including whole industries in some countries, have failed to spread prosperity and have even led to collapsing economies.
But politics is not about what happened in the past. That is left for historians. What politicians are interested in is what they can get the public to believe in the present and to vote on in the future.
Plans to "soak the rich," who are not paying their "fair share," have worked politically, time and time again — and may well work yet again in the 2016 elections.
At the recent televised debate among candidates for the Democrats' nomination for president, Hillary Clinton declared: "The wealthy pay too little" in taxes and "the middle class pays too much."
Some people might wish to argue about whether that is true or not, but no rational argument can be made on either side of this issue, because the words used are completely undefined. Nor is Hillary Clinton the only one who talks this way.
It is one of the signs of the mindlessness of our times that all sorts of people declare that "the rich" are not paying their "fair share" in taxes, without telling us concretely what they mean by either "the rich" or "fair share."
Whether in politics or in the media, words are increasingly used not to convey facts or even allegations of facts, but simply to arouse emotions. Undefined words are a big handicap in logic, but they are a big plus in politics, where the goal is not clarity but victory — and the votes of gullible people count just as much as the votes of people who have common sense.
What a "fair share" of taxes means in practice is simply "more." No matter how high the tax rate is on people with a given income, you can always raise the tax rate further by saying that they are still not paying their "fair share."
Advocates of higher tax rates can get very specific when they want to. A recent article in the New York Times says that raising the tax rate on the top 1% of income earners to 40% would generate "about $157 billion" a year in additional tax revenue for the government.
This calculation ignores mountains of evidence, going back for generations, showing that raising tax rates does not automatically mean raising tax revenues — and has often actually led to falling tax revenues. A fantasy expressed in numbers is still a fantasy.
http://news.investors.com/ibd-edito...s-vague-terms-not-facts-to-push-tax-hikes.htm
A little bit more for the central planning types.
Contrary to the way that some people on the left conceive of the world, neither rich people nor poor people are inert blocks of wood to be moved about like pieces on a chess board in order to carry out some grand design from on high.
Even outright confiscation of people's wealth, including whole industries in some countries, have failed to spread prosperity and have even led to collapsing economies.
But politics is not about what happened in the past. That is left for historians. What politicians are interested in is what they can get the public to believe in the present and to vote on in the future.
Plans to "soak the rich," who are not paying their "fair share," have worked politically, time and time again — and may well work yet again in the 2016 elections.
