Dumbed-Down Fuzzy Math on the Buffett-Law-of-Shame Taxes Initiative and Creativity

At what point did the United States of America change its basic purpose from a land of opportunity to a land of sloth and indolence?

Obviously it happened, because on Monday, September 19, 2011, the President of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama teamed up with capitalist billionaire Warren Buffett, to levy a burdensome tax on anyone else who ever aspires to financial independence.

Aside from the news reports that Warren Buffett is in the middle of a billion-dollar tax dispute with the federal government and is lying to the public that enabled his excesses so as to limit his own exposure, it seems that control over the government is the underlying issue here. Allow me to elucidate.

Remember in the decades after the Vietnam War when the news media reported that children of refugees from the communist atrocities in Southeast Asia were doing exceptionally well in American schools? Remember how the Oriental kids were found to be excelling despite facing major language and cultural barriers?

That wasn't new. Successive waves of immigrants from all over the world, of every racial, ethnic and religious background on the face of the earth have done the same thing virtually from the founding of the New World colonies. America has long been seen from other viewpoints as a true land of opportunity, where nothing was guaranteed, but hard work, industriousness, native intelligence and a measure of creativity could reap rewards that were virtually unheard of elsewhere.

People who came to America from other lands and worked diligently to learn the language, become educated and apply what they had learned to creating opportunities for themselves were not genetically gifted people. They had seen what repression does to the human spirit in Europe, Africa, Asia and South America and had the initiative and fortitude to take a chance on their reasonably unhampered abilities to apply themselves to the fullest.

With each succeeding wave of immigration many observers grudgingly acknowledged that the successes of the immigrant children had as much to do with the work ethic of their parents as anything else. Until now that is.

Now we have the Obama-Buffett Law of Shame in which anyone who earns more than $200,000 annually or $250,000 for couples - which includes just about any small business with a half-dozen employees - will get slammed with a massive increase in their tax rates. When you cut past all the campaign speeches and political rhetoric what we find is that Obama, Buffett and people of their ilk want small businesses and people who are on the cusp of financial independence to pay for the wanton, recklessness spending by the federal government.

As long as these people, who have been steadily moving up the social and economic ladder as a result of their own efforts, are tasked with paying for the excesses of the federal and state governments, it is less likely that they will amass the resources to challenge the government and business manipulators now in control. So even though we know that what is going on in Washington is wrong, even the best equipped among us will be powerless to make substantive change because we'll be too busy just treading water.

It should seem obvious to even a casual observer that the real issue here is not Social Security or Medicare/Medicaid, which can be fixed with a reduction in American foreign aid to hostile countries and transitioning to a consumption tax instead of a productivity tax. No the real issue is the unwillingness of the Obama Administration to curb its voracious appetite for uncontrolled decadence exhibited not only by his wanton spending habits as president, but also by the administration representatives in Congress who refuse to consider serious spending reductions.

Creating another income stream, using the communist class warfare terminology "The Rich" as guinea pigs, not only absolves the administration and Buffett, hereinafter referred to as Obama's Lackey, of the responsibility to curb spending, it buys Obama time to conjure up another re-election strategy since the one he is using now is not working.

Obama claims this is not class warfare "it's math," but it's obvious when you run the real numbers that Obama either suffers from math anxiety as well as depression, he also must have attended one of those dumbed-down schools where the curriculum is geared to the slowest student in the class.

What is really amazing to me is that I spent a good portion of this morning listening to the Fox Business Channel starting with Stuart Varney's show, and aside from Charles Paine didn't hear a lot of people talking about how regressive and unfair the entire income tax system is from the outset.

America didn't have a permanent income tax until the Woodrow Wilson administration, although there was one to fund the Civil War – which kind of answers the "unfunded war" nonsense the Democrats have been bandying about lately as an excuse for Obama's lack of fiscal discipline. There were other taxes and levies in those years though, and America did pretty well as a country without taxing productivity.

The late 1800s saw repeated efforts to enact an income tax by various Socialist and Populist political parties, including the Democrats, who finally got their way in 1913. Note to my Connecticut conservative readers: hold your heads up high, fellow citizens, our state was one of three that flat out rejected the income tax amendment.

Oh, for the days of common sense and true social responsibility.

Despite all the rhetoric, just about every political commentator of every political stripe says this travesty won't get past Congress, primarily because the Republicans, as well as a lot of Democrats, in the House of Representatives are uniformly opposed to it.

But the Obama-Buffett Law of Shame has sparked a lot of discussion and frankly I'm disappointed in where the talk has gone. When Stuart Varney and other Fox Business anchors are discussing how much of an income tax is "fair" it is obvious that the progressives of previous centuries eventually were successful because smart people don't even consider that taxing their productivity is inherently unfair.

The proper amount is nothing. Not a cent. Not a fraction of a cent is a fair tax on productivity.

Why do you think the efforts to scrap the current tax code and enact a flat tax or national consumption tax are referred to as the Fair Tax? Because it is NOT fair to tax the hardest working, smartest and most productive members of society just because they are hard working, smart and productive.

Did you know that even after the Woodrow Wilson administration started making use of the windfall profits it received from the first income tax another three decades went by before the federal government started automatically withholding taxes from workers' pay?

Before that, taxpayers wrote periodic checks to the government to pay for their taxes, monthly, quarterly, annually, whatever. So, even though they were powerless to control how much the government taxed them, they still had power over if they paid or not, at least until Franklin Roosevelt used the military needs of World War II to enact payroll withholding.

Consider, and here I am referring to every person of every political persuasion who reads this column, how much power we would still have over the US government if we paid our taxes from our bank accounts instead of the federal government just grabbing what it wants first and then in its infinite benevolence, allowing us to keep the rest. Except the part the states take.

Now think about this. If the US scrapped the current regressive, anti-growth, counter-productive tax code and initiated a version of the Fair Tax, consumption tax, or national sales tax instead, who would have control over how much tax we pay? We would.

As in WE THE PEOPLE. Imagine that. If we controlled the amount of tax dollars available we'd have some input on spending too.

And that my fellow citizens is the real issue here. If we were to regain – note I said "regain" – control over our own tax expenditures we would regain a measure of control over the federal government.

Take away the government's ability to withhold taxes without responsibility for how those taxes are spent and you have citizen control over the government. If I remember my history correctly, I believe that is just what the founding fathers intended.