"Democrats want to build an America of shared responsibilities and shared opportunities"
- Bill Clinton (July 26,2004)
Sounds lovely.
Problem. What it translates to is this:
The responsible, the hard-working reap fewer rewards for their sacrifices, and the irresponsible reap rewards they did not sow.
How does that promote responsibility? How does this promote wealth-generation? Where will the new opportunities come from?
The message is essentially the same as it has been. Tax the rich. Give it to the poor. Tax and spend.
Am I calling the poor irresponsible? Not really. People can be poor for many reasons. Irresponsibility does lead to lack of wealth, though. I'm not rich. I grew up poor. But I worked hard and I'm getting by. I was encouraged to work hard. And I was encouraged to work hard because I knew that nobody was going to give me anything.
What Reaganomics recognized was that taxes are a drag on the economy. It is true, in order to have a government, taxes are pretty much necessary. But the country is getting bad gas mileage, and we need to adjust the carbeurator. It's running too rich on taxes, draining energy from the economy.
Money represents work. Taxes are a drain on money. Money creates opportunity to use it to make more work through investing. Investing creates more opportunity for work.
Taxes are a drag on this cycle. Raising taxes cuts investment and that cuts opportunity which cuts jobs.
This cuts overall wealth, cutting tax revenue, which leads to higher tax rates (since the government can't seem to drop programs and needs an ever increasing pool of revenue to support more and more people).
Higer tax rates cuts investment again.... and you see where this goes.
So it's all fine and good to talk about shared responsibilities and shared opportunities -- but... how're ya gonna create 'em?
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