Thou shalt pay thy taxes to The One, lest thou incurrest his wrath

What a picture for Yahoo News to use.



From the first moment Obama pushed his "jobs bill" (i.e. jobs for his political supporters with the cost of others' unemployment), he said it would be "paid for." Yesterday he continued to claim, "And it will not add to the deficit. It will be paid for." The truth came out the morning after the original announcement: it's all about tax hikes. As part of a "deficit reduction plan" Obama would have us believe is unrelated, "Obama to propose 'Buffett tax' on millionaires". How dare people believe that they're entitled to the fruits of their labor, how dare they believe that they get to keep their wealth as the reward for their successful decisions!

Anytime a politician says anything close to "largely by raising taxes on wealthier families," every working American had better hang on to his wallet. USA Today spins it as "going after tax breaks for oil companies and the owners of corporate jets." Bill Clinton said on October 19, 1992, "I will tell you this: I will not raise taxes on the middle-class to pay for these programs." How did that work out for us? I was a teenager yet saw through the lie right away. His "shocking" tax hike proposal a mere four months later was shocking to me only because it didn't come sooner. Even the New York Times called it his "plan to raise the taxes of almost all Americans in order to lower the Federal budget deficit."

And beyond the immorality of taking someone's money by force to give to others, Obama's plan is accounting fraud. John Watson at American Thinker pointed out:

The president's new "Jobs Bill" will take over $400 billion from taxpayers over ten years to pay for it, but the expenditures will be authorized right away. There is, however, an inconvenient truth about which the president has failed to remind us: today's Congress cannot bind a future Congress. Therefore, if the government wants to spend $400 billion right away, then they need to find a way to cut $400 billion of spending right away, not by some non-binding ten year ruse. To do otherwise only increases today's deficit.

This scheme would supposedly add 2.7% to a $15 trillion economy. There's just one problem: it wouldn't work for the same reason the $787 billion stimulus didn't work. It's the worst economics: $400 billion in tax hikes means taking $400 billion from spending or savings that would have happened in other forms. Bastiat's lesson on broken windows is economics' quantum singularity from which there is no escape.