Tax Lawyer's Blog

Listen to left-lurching tax law professor and tax blogger Linda Beale wax indignant about Greece’s austerity program (emphasis is mine):

The austerity demands, in order for a sovereign nation to pay back its debt to mostly big banks that lent money recklessly in the leadup to the financial crisis, make no sense at all.  If you impose austerity, you clamp down on the economy.  If you clamp down on the economy, the poor and near-poor who are already struggling will struggle even more.  Unemployment will increase.  Desperation will set in and crime or revolution will follow.  The 1% at the top do okay at least for a while–after all, they’ve been hogging all the good stuff for a decade at least, and many of them (if the scofflaw wealthy in this country are any guide) will have sequestered funds away in hidden offshore bank accounts to bide them through the rough times or even support them if they expatriate to avoid the mayhem.

Let’s deal with each of the highlighted phrases in order:

1. “big banks that lent money recklessly in the leadup to the financial crisis”

This is classic liberal blame-shifting. The banks, you see, are the villains for lending moneys to people whom they should have known would welsh on their debts. The people who welshed on their debts aren’t villains, but victims. You see, in Ms. Beale’s world (and the world of every egalitarian liberal), someone should have stopped these poor, pathetic & helpless souls from hurting themselves.

In America, people applied for loans they could not afford by using fraudulent stated incomes and forged references. These people are the criminals, not the banks who loaned the moneys to them. And this is especially true because banks were forced by our do-good government to make loans to everyone lest they be accused of racism for discriminating against an unemployed and unemployable member of some sacred minority.

2.  “desperation will set in and crime or revolution will occur”

Here, Professor Beale unwittingly shows us why entitlement programs are bad policy in the first place. Once you start giving things to people you can’t stop. So Linda is right when she suggests that austerity programs (the cutting back of entitlements) means that  “desperation will set in and crime or revolution will follow.” But by admitting this she is also admitting  that there is an implied threat underlying all entitlement programs. To wit,

You either continue to give us what you have always given us or we will throw a brick through your window.

The idea that we should give people things so they don’t hurt us is anathema to all decent, freedom-loving Americans. We don’t and shouldn’t negotiate with economic terrorists.

3.  “hogging all the good stuff”

Alas, here is the obligatory envy. Ms. Beale thinks it’s unfair that some people have more good stuff than other people, regardless of how or why they got it. This is an amazing admission because it proves that the left’s goal is the redistribution of wealth to make sure that everyone has the same stuff. Ironically, this is the kind of thinking that got us into the housing crisis in the first place i.e. the federal government, in its infinite wisdom, concluded that everyone should own a home and demanded that banks give mortgages even to jobless, irresponsible and unreliable people.

4.  “scofflaw wealthy in this country”

There is nothing whatsoever illegal about moving your money overseas and those who do so are, therefore, not scofflaws. A tax scofflaw, as Professor Beale surely knows, is someone who breaks the law by failing to pay the taxes he legally owes. If not paying taxes you don’t owe makes you a scofflaw, then the billionaire darling of the left, Warren Buffet, is a scofflaw because he admits that he pays less taxes than he should pay.

Somehow Ms. Beale has managed to delude herself that the rich man who moves his assets overseas in anticipation of a violent uprising of the masses here in America is the criminal and that the masses who actually engage in that violent uprising are the victims.

Where is George Orwell when you need him?

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