Democrats have decided that taxing your income alone is no longer enough, so they have added injury to income by weaponizing taxation in a myriad of invasive ways, concocting ever-growing schemes to extract your money and productivity. If you have worked hard by devoting more of your life to producing goods and services that other people want to buy, you already are taxed far too heavily through a counterproductive “progressive tax system.”
Now that is not enough. If you have exercised constraint and wisdom and handling money and have saved your money and invested wisely and frugally the Democrats want to inflict upon you to a new tax on your accumulated wealth. Democrats want to bleed away by confiscation and taxation the wealth that you work extra hard to achieve. That is the new value proposition posed by these greedy people.
Democrats make a huge deal about greedy Wall Street people and greedy people and corporations and greedy this and greedy that. They condemn people with a lot of money as being greedy and are painted as somehow “cheating the system” to feather their nests. What they don’t tell you and what is a pattern with Democrats is that they are the greedy ones.
Question: is it really greedy from a Judeo-Christian perspective, principles, and ethics, to want to keep the wealth that you have honestly sacrificed to accumulate through the free market by providing goods and services other people really want to pay for because those goods and services increase the quality and well-being of their lives?
Or, is it greedy to want to strip those productive people of their money? Is it greedy to want to keep your wealth or is it greedy to want to confiscate someone else’s wealth?
Scripture has a word for that: covetousness.
Tragically many Democrat leaders eschew traditional morality. Instead, they view life as a zero-sum game. This is completely asinine for it completely ignores the productive and creative powers God has given His children to create wealth for the betterment of all His children. Confiscation through wealth tax is plain evil for it robs God’s children of the fruits of their labors.
This simply means that if Joe has more money than Tom, somehow Joe cheated Tom. The underlying value proposition is also that everybody should have the same amount of wealth no matter if they worked for it or not. This is about as destructive as things can get from an economic perspective. It does not matter to the Democrats if Joe worked three times as hard as Tom. Joe is not deserving of any more wealth than Tom. This is the socialist dictum of equality at all costs. It’s not equality of opportunity, no, it’s equality of result. And if the results do not match up equally then the person who has gathered more wealth for themselves and their family and their other pursuits then that person must be punished by increasing taxes on the wealthy itself not just on the income.
Life in Socialistville completely removes the incentive to work extra hard and produce goods and services, and to invent new goods and services that will increase the health and well-being of everybody in society. This is one major reason that life is so miserable today and socialist countries. You can work 100 hours per week and your life situation economically will not change because you are supposed to be equal to the people who sprout roots in their backsides watching TV all day.
This Democrat/Socialist system creates a bland, gray existence where even meager needs are not meet due to the inherent assassination of incentive by the Socialist system. Eventually, those who work, work more slowly since there is nothing in it for them to be more productive. The USSR collapsed under the weight of this counterproductive system. Venezuela and Cuba are other recent examples. And as for North Korea, Bernie Sanders chooses to live in his multi-million-dollar home in the good ole USA than to live over there or in any other Socialist or Communist land.
Instead, Bernie and other Democrat leaders are proposing wealth confiscation plans.
Bernie’s proposes:
- 1 percent tax on wealth over $32 million
- 2 percent tax on wealth over $50 million
- 3 percent tax on wealth over $250 million
- 8 percent tax on wealth over $10 billion
Not to be outdone, Elizabeth Warren has her plan too:
- 2 percent tax on wealth over $50 million
- 3 percent tax on wealth over $1 billion
Warren says her plan raises a calculated $2.6 trillion over 10 years.
Both these taxes confiscate money from the private sector where all wealth is created. To create wealth, you need two things: labor and capital. If labor is available but no capital to invest in machinery, for example, there will be no wealth creation. And this is precisely what the Democrats want to do. In the name of “equality of outcome”, they want to strip away and tax away the money needed to invest in plants and equipment so labor can be put to use to create more wealth and services which in turn increases the health and well-being of the citizens. Kind of like eating all your seed corn without planting it and allowing it to bring forth a far larger corn harvest.
If I were Satan and wanted to destroy the United States of America, this is one of the things I would do. It is like putting handcuffs on your best baseball players and expect them to go win games. For that matter, if you have no money to buy bats, I doubt their batting average would be very high either. That is fundamentally and simply the root of the problem: The Socialist/Democrat schemes are not sustainable.
Richard Ferguson is a retired business executive and is now a full-time author.
