Ballot Initiatives to Raise Taxes on Top Earners

Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier

In addition to getting to make a mostly aesthetic choice between the presidencies of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton this November, voters in possibly four states will get to decide whether to punish their most productive citizens with higher taxes. And I’ll be stunned if those measures don’t pass in all states that have them on the ballot. The Left, particularly the new statist demi-god Bernie Sanders, has long made suspicion of and hostility toward the productive part of their mantra; it was in fact, the entire basis of the Sanders campaign. And, statists vastly outnumber the productive, particularly the productive who will get fleeced by these bills, so, there’s little risk of them not passing in my humble estimation. Currently, Colorado and Maine are considering ballot initiatives to raise taxes on top earners, Minnesota is looking to apply the state’s socialist security tax to high incomes; that money is earmarked for senior citizens and the disabled. California voters could, and probably will, prevent a tax-increase on the wealthy from sun-setting and instead extend it another dozen years.

Interestingly, if all four measures make it onto ballots this November, Bloomberg reported that more voters will be faced with initiatives to increase taxes than any year since 1980, according to Ballotpeida, and online almanac. Bloomberg’s article on the matter went on to say that the “Occupy Wall
Street movement and Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign have brought attention to the widening gap between rich and poor as states and municipalities expect a slowdown in tax collections as the economic recovery cools.”

There are a lot of things in that sentence that beg expanding upon, but instead the article goes on to quote an ostensibly suicidal dummy named Morris Pearl, head of Patriotic Millionaires, a group of wealthy Americans who are all so damn dumb they actually advocate higher taxes on the rich. Safe bet there’s a lot of old money in that group.

Yes, indeed the perennial-victims who are the Occupy movement and Bernie’s supporters are quite focused on the “gap” between the wealthiest producers and the laziest workers. The question I have is; what the hell does jacking up taxes on the rich have to do with narrowing the so-called “wealth gap?” The very notion makes as much sense as slaughtering tens of thousands of captives from rival tribes to ensure a good harvest in the fall. It obviously make a helluva lot of sense to the Aztecs, despite the fact we now know the rate of human sacrifice had nothing to do with prevailing weather patterns, and the only principle effect it had was to scare the hell out of the nation’s enemies and punish them by decimating their armies on the altar.

Indeed, raising taxes on the rich is much the same. The wealthy CEO is brought low, forced upon the bloody altar while High Priest Sanders plunges the ceremonial blade home. The peasantry cheers, the blood flows, everyone feels better about themselves. Save the CEO, of course. In reality, however, the so-called “wealth gap” hasn’t moved; the taxes are mostly punitive in nature. The poor and unproductive aren’t any wealthier; their share in the increased government spending that taxing the rich even more allows more of won’t improve their lot in life in any noticeable way. And, unlike the Aztec’s captives, the wealthy are actually very mobile. There are, after all, seven states in the USA that have no income tax at all. If I were being targeted for punitive taxation by the state (admittedly, this would be a good problem to have, and one I am most certainly not facing), I’d already be looking at real-estate in one of those seven states.

If we want to believe this “wealth gap” is a thing, fine. In fact, for the sake of argument, let’s assume it is an actual thing. Leave it to government to decide the best way to narrow the gap is to bring lower the top earners, rather than figure out how to elevate the bottom ones. Oh, I know the Most Worshipful State has a plan for that too – it merely calls for divorcing labor value from labor compensation – a move that causes far more harm than good. Those are really the only two tools in the government’s bag for “fixing” this problem; increase taxes, force businesses to pay workers more. Both ideas are, of course, based on the government’s monopoly on violence and are underwritten by the promise of violence, as are all laws.

So, the only practical purpose of these ballot proposals is to concentrate more power and wealth at the government level by stealing it away from the people who earned it in the first place. That it is citizens and not the legislatures of those states proposing these increases in some cases that makes it all the more disconcerting. According to the Bloomberg article, people earning more than $250,000 paid more than 51 percent of all income taxes collected in 2014, despite accounting for only 2.7 percent of all taxpayers, as per the Pew Research Center. The Left has managed to wind up their theistic statists, once again, and, as per usual, they don’t seem too clear on who they’re mad at or why or how to fix the problem they perceive. They just know more government, higher taxes and anything that hurts the evil rich people is a good thing.

When are people going to finally figure out that since government at all levels IS the problem, it cannot be part of the solution? Are we all going to have to pay an income tax rate of 100% before we realize this? I guess that’s the silver-lining to all this statist nonsense; that there is only a finite amount of blood that can be squeezed out of a turnip, they can’t tax us more than 100%. Can they?