This following spreadsheet debacle tote board has earned a lot of Internet ink today. From BizzyBlog:
There's a lot of John Galt talk associated with it, including the title of the BizzyBlog blog entry. I don't care for it. What is understandable is not always commendable. What is predictable is not always to be aquiesced to.
It's crappy to talk with glee about other people's misery. It's all I see, everywhere, among the pundit class. People with sinecures, full of 20/20 hindsight advice for people who did their best to participate in American public life and got creamed. Can we have a care for those under the wheels of this bus, please?
Going John Galt deliberately is such a petty thing to claim. It's the battle cry of the effete, the sheltered, the shiftless. Poor people don't have the luxury of going Galt; they go hungry. It's an inapt title, anyway, for the undesired effect of strangling investment in the cradle. But instead of pointing out that the malefactors that have prima facie contempt for all commerce that doesn't involve the government are dismantling the entire edifice of honest pay for honest work in the private sector, you're claiming you're deliberately trying to hurt your fellow citizens -- to use their misery as a club to beat your political foes. That marks yourself for contempt. Would you deliberately hurt your fellow citizens to prove a point? I doubt it, really I do; why would you say you'd welcome a chance to do it? It is pure ego that makes you claim you're doing it on purpose. "I meant to do that" belongs in a comedy sketch.
Sensible people who are well-off are very cautious right now, and have been since that day John McCain, already the last turkey in the shop, announced he was suspending his campaign and going back to Washington to look for another camera to get in front of. That was the day everyone knew you were going to get Studs Urkel, San Fran Nan, and Dingy Harry running your affairs for four years. A three horned anti-capitalist bull was born that day, no later. But I'm not talking about being sensible here.
People not so well-off were sensible, too, and borrowed money to purchase a house whose value was determined by credible third parties, and got creamed. They purchased items on credit lent at 9 percent and suddenly collected at 29 percent. They worked hard at jobs that ceased to exist overnight. They navigated the shoals of everyday life using the only buoys of information at hand to determine how to proceed. Now I watch wealthy people mocking them by saying they got what they always deserved. Working people shouldn't have a decent standard of living just by bumping along and cooperating and trying, should they? Let's call their house sprawl and their children dullards and their food junk and their autos hogs and tell them to get back to the trailer park where they belong.
George Bailey's speech during the bank run in It's a Wonderful Life is a darling of the left, but I've never understood why. It's the most conservative thing I've ever heard. I don't hear Marx in there, I hear Hayek: If your money is pooled with an attitude of trust and probity it can be lent out to spur further economic activity and everybody wins, including the bank that holds it and lends it. I'm living in Bizarro Bedford Falls now, and when the bank and its overlords in governance forget the trust and probity part, an army of George Baileys in Armani suits shows up to excoriate the Christmas Club depositors for not always expecting an apocalypse so fervently you're de facto wishing for it.
Look at the chart again. I'm going to give you a perspective you'll not get elsewhere. Line one: Rich people aren't paying taxes. Line three: Businesses big enough to weather a big recession aren't paying taxes.
Line two is where you weep. Poor people pay their FICA. It never changes. And there's no writing off your show dogs as livestock, or getting paid bonuses instead of wages so there's less tax to pay and so forth. Lower middle class people pay that tax on 100% of their income -- 15%+ and no respite -- because they never get over the income threshold that makes the Galt-goers scoff and the taxation stop.
The government, Democrat and Republican alternatingly, has collected Social Security from poor working people since we were still bombing Hanoi, and spent it as if it was revenue instead of a payment to defray a future liability. Since a government that issues money can't save money, it had to return it or blow it. They blew it. Poor people mowed lawns and cut hair to pay for rich people's government gimmes.
Look at line two. Do the math. Even if you give them no credit for Income Tax, people that wash dishes and mop floors are now contributing 39% of the revenue the federal government collects. Last year, that figure was 27%. Forget how much is deficit, because they're going to pay that too, eventually, because capital taken is destroyed, so all that's left to tax is wages, really. If you're lucky enough to earn any. That's the true fallout from this tax-the rich debacle. Can we stop mocking poor people for not having a UBS account to allow them to go all sorts of Galt on the government's ass like you're doing by claiming you're refusing to earn lots of money? It's unbecoming as a nation. And we're still, that, aren't we?
