Followers

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

The 'Rich'

President Obama said in a clip yesterday that a teacher or person who makes $50,000 a year should not be paying a greater percentage of income taxes than a person who makes $250,000 a year should. In theory this sounds reasonable. What I see is that using teachers is a bad example. Teachers in the United States typically get their summers off. I sure as hell would like to make that kind of money AND have all summers off! (I know a couple of teachers who play golf and have a pretty decent handicap. I wonder how they have that much time.) Teachers also get sick time and tend to have other days off (Institute days) that the rest of the working world does not have. And this is all before we speak about pensions. Then we should speak about how teachers are protected like no others. Just attempt to fire a bad one and see how difficult it can be. This goes for any government employee for that matter. Naturally, some positions are more protected than others are. The point is that the system is set up that way. This is another place where our President and I disagree.

Typically, the person who makes the kind of money that President Obama calls ‘The rich’ are much more vulnerable to being let go (Or going bankrupt) than those who do not. (An exception is government employees, but lets skip that for now.) And if let go, it is much more difficult to replace that type of position. It is not like those types of jobs grow on trees. The responsibilities that go with that type of position should be much greater than those jobs that pay far less should. The point that I am attempting to make is that it is far easier to force people to be downwardly mobile than to encourage the system to produce upwardly mobile individuals. Taxation on a capitalist system does this. Naturally, any system can sustain a certain percentage of drain without serious effect. Capitalism is stronger than any other, so that percentage is higher. Even then, the percentage is not all that high before you begin to effect the system in a negative way. (We reached that point a very long time ago.)

President Obama believes that government can allocate the wealth of the nation better, more effectively and more ‘fairly’ than private organizations or the individual can. So it makes sense that taxation is one of the tools to ‘level the playing field’. I do not just disagree. Our country’s history has demonstrated that government does NOT allocate the wealth of the nation more effectively. And ‘fair’ is a decidedly subjective concept. What is ‘fair’ to you can be entirely different than what it means to me. The same can be said about the term ‘rich’.

To a homeless person, a person who has a job at McDonalds is a ‘rich’ person. Not to mention that ‘rich’ can mean many different things, like a very ‘rich’ or ‘full’ life. You can’t measure that concept. It is entirely subjective. I find it interesting that President Obama is now talking about ‘class warfare’. This can only be the result of the idea of subjectively discriminating against a group of people as he is doing with the group of people that he calls ‘rich’.

1 comment:

  1. Obama did not start the conversation about class warfare, it was Paul Ryan. Regarding the rich...he is some interesting history:
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/opinion/krugman-the-social-contract.html?_r=1&src=ISMR_HP_LO_MST_FB

    ReplyDelete