14.6.06

"These rich people are bad for America"

So the estate tax cut went down in the Senate, to the cheers of class warriors everywhere. Congratulations to Democratic senators Evan Bayh, Mary Landrieu, Ron Wyden, and Mark Pryor — all of whom voted against death-tax repeal after voting in favor of it a few years ago. At last, they’ve come to their senses!

(...)

These rich people are bad for America. We don’t need their ingenuity, their entrepreneurship, or their capital investment. In the name of egalitarian socialism, the only thing we need from them is more tax dollars. We now tax their incomes as salary, corporate profits, dividends, capital gains, and at death. But we must do better.

Perhaps we can tax them when they contribute to charities, or the building of a new church or synagogue, or a symphony orchestra, or a small-town cultural center; or when they create another college; or when they finance private scholarships for inner-city educations.

But we can’t stop there. Let’s criminalize the entire class of successful American entrepreneurs. Let’s haul out the distributional tables from the Joint Tax Committee and the Congressional Budget Office and target all upper-end earners for special wealth taxes.

Maybe we can even impose jail sentences on rich people. No more interest income at all, just like the radical fundamentalist Muslims do it!

(...)

This may all sound wrong, but our soak-the-rich liberals are deep thinkers. They have their fingers on the pulse of the hundred-million-strong investor class. They know that the worldwide spread of free-market economics, which was launched by Reagan and Thatcher twenty-five years ago, which has raised global prosperity to record heights, and which has caused the phenomenal growth of the middle class in places like India, China, and Russia, is absolutely nuts.

After all, capital is the enemy of labor! Forget the obvious facts that you can’t create a new job without a business and that you can’t fund a new business without capital. That’s obviously wrong.
(agradeço ao leitor Carlos Carvalho a indicação do link)