It is pretty easy to put forth a budget and explain how you are going to pay for it when reality has no bearing on those numbers. In a masterful job of talking out of both sides of your mouth and getting away with it, President Obama is signing hundreds of billions in new pork barrel spending one day, calling for fiscal restraint and a reduction of the deficit on the next day and then proposing a massive budget with hundreds of billions in new spending on health insurance above and beyond what is already in place in an era of declining revenue. He claims that he can find savings in wasteful spending and by letting tax cuts expire on “the rich” and only impact the top 2% of taxpayers.
One word for you: Baloney!
In a piece titled “The 2% Illusion”, the Wall Street Journal lays to rest the notion that we can have an enormous increase in spending and only those rich fat cats are going to have to pay for it.
One of the most grotesque aspects of the modern Democrat Party is their faux populism. When you see filthy rich white liberals proclaiming the need for the rich to pay their fair share while riding in limos and flying first class, alarm bells should be going off. Although the Left doesn’t like facts, they are troublesome to set aside and these are the facts when it comes to the rich paying “their fair share”:
Consider the IRS data for 2006, the most recent year that such tax data are available and a good year for the economy and "the wealthiest 2%." Roughly 3.8 million filers had adjusted gross incomes above $200,000 in 2006. (That's about 7% of all returns; the data aren't broken down at the $250,000 point.) These people paid about $522 billion in income taxes, or roughly 62% of all federal individual income receipts. The richest 1% -- about 1.65 million filers making above $388,806 -- paid some $408 billion, or 39.9% of all income tax revenues, while earning about 22% of all reported U.S. income.
Even taking the neo-socialist agenda of Obama and company to its logical extreme and taking every taxable dime of the “rich” is not going to get it done…
But let's not stop at a 42% top rate; as a thought experiment, let's go all the way. A tax policy that confiscated 100% of the taxable income of everyone in America earning over $500,000 in 2006 would only have given Congress an extra $1.3 trillion in revenue. That's less than half the 2006 federal budget of $2.7 trillion and looks tiny compared to the more than $4 trillion Congress will spend in fiscal 2010. Even taking every taxable "dime" of everyone earning more than $75,000 in 2006 would have barely yielded enough to cover that $4 trillion.
Ah those facts, so troubling and inconvenient!
A 2010 Federal budget of almost four trillion dollars (that is $4,000,000,000,000) means that given the approximately 300 million people in America, the Federal government is spending (and taxing and borrowing) on your behalf around $13,000+ for every man, woman and child. With a median household income in 2007 of $50,233 nationally, and presuming an average household size of four people (two adults and two kids) that means that we have approximately 75 million households in America. Thus the Federal government in 2010 is spending the equivalent of $52,000 per household, which is more than the media household income nationally. These statistics may be a little off, I am not using a scientific metholodgy here but the point remains that the Federal government in 2010 is proposing to spend more per household than the median household makes in a year. Does anyone else see a problem with that?
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