Colin Cowherd, one of my favorite sports-talk hosts on ESPN radio, likes to say that if you want to know if something makes sense, say it out loud. Stripping naked and running out on to the field during game 7 of the World Series seems like a great idea when it's trapped, unspoken, inside your head... but say it out loud, and... yeah, not such a hot idea afterall.
So I always think of Colin when I hear Obama (or one of his spokesholes) say that he wants to give a tax cut to 95% of Americans.
Say that out loud. "95% of Amercians."
Just doesn't make any goddamned sense does it? Why not? Well because I know, and you probably do too, that a large percentage of Amercians pay no Federal income tax at all. Zero. I think it's in the neighborhood of 40%. And if you didn't know that already...
A large percentage of Americans pay no Federal income tax, somewhere in the neighborhood of 40%.
So how can you give a bunch of people who don't pay taxes, a tax cut?
The answer is you can't. Obama isn't exactly lying to you, but he's stretching the truth further than Pam Anderson stretches a bra strap. What he's planning to do is put a bunch of tax credits in place that are fully refundable. What this means is that, unlike a normal tax credit, which stops being applicable once your individual tax burden reaches zero... under the Obama plan, you would conitnue to accrue tax credits as a bonus even after your tax burden has been reduced to nothing.
Which means that under Obama's plan, a bunch of people are going to get checks for a shitload of money they didn't earn, but that someone else did.
Calling this a "tax cut" is about as dishonest as it gets. I don't care if you want to vote for straight-up Robin Hood wealth redistribution... literally taking money from some Americans and handing it over to other Americans who did nothing to earn it... but don't insult me by trying to pass it off as some kind of middle class tax cut. No one's tax rate is being reduced... no one! And you goddamned well know it too!
But here's the really nasty part.
Obama's plan is going to take another huge chunk of Americans and remove them from the taxpayer rolls, continuing a disturbing trend of the last three decades. Recall that I pointed out we're somewhere in the neighborhood of 40% now. That is to say 40% of Americans don't contribute to the Federal income tax burden, but are set to receive nice bonus checks as if they do, under a President Obama. This will create a situation where those people are incentivized to vote for even more tax increases because it means they will get larger checks!
How freakin' perverse is that!?
And that's at the current 40% level... and so now a question has to be asked.
What happens when that number goes from 40% to 51%? What if President Obama creates a situation where MORE Americans are incentivized to vote for tax increases than are incentivized to vote against them?
I don't know about you, but that's a terrifying question to consider.
Unfortunately, we might find out the answers sometime in the next four years.
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I saw this quote on The Corner today and think it fits, from Robert Heinlein's "To Sail Beyond the Sunset:
"The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a "warm body" democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction.... [O]nce a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader — the barbarians enter Rome."
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