Tax Lawyer's Blog

When I started this blog I vowed that I would stay out of politics. 

But I’m only human.

I was reading my tax feeds and came across yet another interesting post from Joe Kristan of TaxUpdates. It’s titled 51% Spend the Money of 49%.

It’s short so here it is in its entirety: 

Regardless of who wins the election, the federal income tax looks like it will be paid more and more by a narrow, wealthier segment of the population. It seems unwise to have so many voters in a position to vote to fund programs they won’t be paying for, but there it is.

UPDATE: Somebody else feels the same way.

Joe links to Kay Bell’s post, 44% of U.S. Taxpayers Could Owe 0 and to Glenn Reynolds’ post, Shared Sacrifice.

Kay nails the problem on its head with a quote from Scott Hodge, the author of a Tax Foundation paper that concluded that under either Obama’s or McCain’s plan nearly half of all Americans would not pay tax:

It’s time for a serious public discussion of whether it is desirable to have so many Americans disconnected from the cost of government and what the consequences are of using the tax system as a vehicle for social policy.

Reynolds amplifies this,

So one theme we’ve heard in criticizing President Bush is that, post 9/11, he didn’t require “sacrifice from the American people.” This is generally a euphemism for “higher taxes.”  It seems to me that shared sacrifice is not only about some people paying more to the federal government, but also about others taking less. And, yeah, that’ll hurt, but that’s what “sacrifice” is about, right?

Now here is where I break my vow: Reynolds is exactly right when he says that Democrats who criticized Bush for telling Americans to “go shopping” (what the President meant, of course, was “don’t let the terrorists break your spirit. Conduct your lives as you would normally conduct them to show them how tough you are”) were really attacking him for not raising taxes. 

But what gets my goat is that those who mocked Bush for not asking Americans to sacrifice are the same people who popped fresh blood vessels whenever the administration proposed anything that actually did require sacrifice.

Let’s take the Patriot Act, for example. In the interest of combatting terrorism Bush asked all Americans to sacrifice a smidgen of their privacy (the mere possibility of a wire tap without a warrant), a dash of their convenience (heightened airport security measures) and a dollup of their freedom (no habeus corpus for suspected terrorists held on foreign soil). 

And how did those pro-sacrifice Democrats react to those modest demands for sacrifice: They squawked louder than stuck mules.

No, it isn’t sacrifice the left really wants, it’s wealth redistribution.

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