Democrats are wrong on taxes

Isabel Lyman, Daily Hampshire Gazette

Thursday, July 10, 2003 -- There once was a Democrat named John F. Kennedy, who had sensible economic ideas. In the early '60s, he noted that "an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenues to balance our budget, just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits."

In the years following President Kennedy's proposed tax cuts, the U.S. economy grew at a healthy rate of more than 5 percent annually. The days of Camelot are long over. Now the citizenry is stuck with JFK's relatives and sycophants.

Take Patrick J. Kennedy. The Rhode Island congressman brought the notion of taxation with representation to a new low. The Washington Post reported June 27 that Kennedy told a gathering of young Democrats, "I don't need Bush's tax cut. I have never worked a [expletive deleted] day in my life." Get Pat a ditch-digging gig, and wash his mouth with soap.

Meanwhile, our man in Washington D.C. - Congressman John W. Olver - appears to have imbibed too much Karl Marx. He criticized President George W. Bush's tax relief plan because it disproportionately benefits the wealthy. Or, as he puts it, "Tax cuts are stripping the capacity of government to provide services to people."

Democrats sound so noble when they champion government services. Well, let them, and their ilk, act nobly. Let them pool their economic and material resources to help "the people" build a Welfare State while subverting the Constitution. The rest of us can then declare the current system of taxation (read: legal plunder) as oppressive.

One of the complaints in the Declaration of Independence, against the British crown, was about "imposing Taxes on us without our Consent." What would the Declaration's signers think about the approximately 40 percent in taxes that many contemporary Americans passively pay? Now about Olver's comment that the Bush tax plan favors the wealthy - well, yeah.

As James Miller, who teaches economics at Smith College, logically explains, "Since the rich pay most of the taxes, you would expect them to receive the greatest savings from nearly any tax cut." Adds Ken Robinson, a tax-code savvy attorney from Ware, "Ergo, the rich should receive the most tax relief, since they pay the most."

In 2000, the Internal Revenue Service reveals that those with incomes in the top 5 percent paid more than 56 percent of all taxes, while the top 1 percent - those earning 3,469 and above - paid 37 percent of all taxes. However, those in the bottom half - earning less than ,682 a year - paid less than 4 percent in income taxes.

Can anybody say flat tax?

Making lots of money remains one of the top reasons that poor immigrants trek to the United States. The Declaration's signers were hardly destitute men if they pledged their "fortunes" to the cause of liberty. And, in a shaky economy, with growing unemployment, to monetarily penalize the play-by-the-rules wealthy with higher taxes amounts to voodoo economics. Here is my two-cents worth why.

First, millionaires and billionaires create choices for the rest of us. Their venture capitalism and big-ticket purchases produce jobs. The well-off also contribute to charities and churches, advance the arts and sciences, entertain and inform us, and take risks. Thanks to Ms. Moneybags Oprah Winfrey and her book club, less-known authors have prospered and found fame. Contributing 0 million, billionaires John T. Walton and Theodore J. Forstmann have assisted tens of thousands of low-income students through their Children's Scholarship Fund, which provides partial private-school vouchers.

Lew Rockwell, the prominent libertarian, notes, "[T]he prosperity of everyone in a market economy depends in good part on the rich. The capital they have earned and saved generates investments ... Their savings keep interest rates low. Their actions are philanthropic in every sense."

Second, constantly portraying the rich as evil villains sometimes causes them to flee. Forbes has reported that among the prosperous who have renounced their American citizenship are John Dorrance III, a Campbell Soup heir; Ted Arison, the Carnival Cruise Lines founder; and industrialist Michael Dingman.

Their reasons for becoming expatriates vary from wanting to protect their heirs from crushing inheritance taxes to a frustration with the changing tax code to annoyance at seeing their hard-earned dollars carelessly redistributed by the likes of John Olver. They have moved to islands like the Bahamas and St. Kitts to live in luxury and peace and to freely manage benevolent foundations. Our loss.

It's no mystery why Democratic lawmakers belittle the rich and tax cuts which also benefit the middle-classes. Demagoguery works. Stirring class envy earns votes, grows government to gargantuan proportions, and furthers cronyism. In this thoughtless scramble for power, the economic legacy, left by leaders like John Hancock and John F. Kennedy, has been regrettably squandered.