Almost everyone remembers the words attributed to Pastor Niemöller:
In Germany they first came for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me —
and by that time no one was left to speak up.
We have often heard the same thing from Obama and his progressive allies on Capitol Hill: We can expand government services, in the middle of a recession, and not only cut taxes on 55% of workers (whom do pay federal taxes) but provide reimbursable tax credits to 40% of workers (whom don't pay federal taxes). All of this with only a modest reversion to Clinton-era high tax bracket rates affecting 5% of workers.
This Democratic fantasy that they can expand tax cuts, credits, and program resources available to lower-income people by increasing investment and wage taxes on the job creator class simply sounds too good to be true, and in fact it is too good to be true. Even if you confiscate all the income of the top 5% (and let's pretend for the moment that anti-growth policies of high taxation don't affect business and job opportunities), there's not nearly enough to cover the reckless tab being run up by progressive spendthrifts in Congress.
The progressives, of course, figure that there's very little political risk to targeting 5% of the electorate whom aren't supporting them anyway. (Of course, the Bill of Rights serves to protect minorities, including propertied interests, against the tyranny of majoritarian abuse.) Sooner or later, though, you have to pay your tab. If the government simply prints money, the result is inflation, a particularly cruel tax on those with limited income. Not to mention job-killing, income-shrinking high interest rates once foreign buyers start balking at purchasing T-bills, meaning we have to raise interest rates to attract investment. The bill will have to be paid--if not from the 95% benefiting from most of the new spending, then their children and grandchildren.
It's time for people "in the lower 95%" to speak up. Democratic "Robin Hood" schemes to "soak the rich" (of which I myself am not a member) not only undermine the American dream, but fundamentally require us to make sure that the custodians of our tax revenues are making necessary, efficient, effective utilization of them before coming back for more from any taxpayer, rich or poor.
The health care "reform" legislation is a case in point. We have a private-sector health insurance system which serves over 80% of the American public, generally speaking happily; in fact, federal employees enjoy a selection of vendors probably better than most private-sector workers have access to. What's particularly notable is that the "public option" plan is something even the Congressional Democrats and Obama themselves have admitted they wouldn't want to have for themselves.
The uninsured include a number of segments, including temporarily uninsured (e.g., between jobs) and above-average income households whom self-insure. The Democrats insist that the uninsured are a failure of the private sector (although there is no government mandate for coverage and some individuals prefer to pay for medical costs as needed), that rising costs are the result of inadequate private sector competition (although they refuse to deregulate interstate barriers to entry, including unrealistic, high-cost policies such as enrolling on the day of illness, which fails to address individual responsibility for his health care), disregard the actuarial implications of an aging population (directly related to higher medical costs), refuse to consider reforms directly related to the supply and affordability of physician services, e.g., medical malpractice tort reform, and incoherently argue that the issue of the uninsured has now reached a crisis stage which requires federal government intervention in the middle of a severe recession with a bloated federal deficit. (This certainly is questionable given the fact that patients cannot be denied emergency care based on ability to pay.)
This doesn't mean there aren't issues--but the fact is that government is part of the problem, not the solution. For instance, Medicare and Medicaid patient care is largely subsidized by the private sector since the government established reimbursement rates to doctors and hospitals by fiat--at prices some 20 to 30% below market price. We have a problem where many insurance policyholders don't have a stake in the efficient utilization of health care dollars, something Republican proposals for health savings accounts address in part, i.e., high-deductible insurance. We have a problem where high-risk patients are not assigned in a fair manner across providers and where small businesses and others do not have critical mass to attract favorable pricing from vendors; we have a problem of catastrophic health care costs which can bankrupt families, and we have a problem with skyrocketing medical malpractice insurance and defensive medicine costs; the proper response of policymakers is to provide the market with sufficient guidance, regulations and incentives to address these problems--and that does not mean that the answers to these problems is for incompetent government bureaucrats to get into the health insurance business.
What's rather amusing is hearing the Democrats float around tax ideas in an effort to fund ObamaCare and then hear liberal commentators, media fact checkers, and the like then claim that none of these are in the legislation. For example, we have heard the Democrats insist they could "pay as you go"--the same people whom barely can find $17B or $102M dollars to cut from over a trillion dollar budget (phony progressive lip service to which I refer as "Liberal Trivial Pursuit"). Every single time we've seen a state (e.g., Tennessee and Massachusetts) take up universal coverage, we have seen costs skyrocketing out of control. The Democrats have also floated the idea of a VAT (a national sales tax) to pay for their program, which would adversely affect consumer product/service demand and the jobs linked to them during the recession; they have even floated the idea of limiting the business tax subsidy for gold-plated plans (which Bush and McCain had proposed in an effort to provide a universal tax-advantaged basis for health insurance, under withering criticism from Obama)--not to provide consumers paying for their own insurance from after-tax dollars equal protection but to pay for their health care sinkhole. There has also been discussion of taxing businesses (primarily small businesses whom find health care insurance costs uncompetitive) as if it's the government's business to micromanage how private-sector concerns structure compensation; recall that the involvement of business in providing health care insurance in the first place was to work around federal wage-price controls during WWII!
Obama and his progressive Congressional allies shrink from the CBO trillion-dollar price tags for their ill-considered Trojan horse "public option" proposal (again, the progressive fact checkers will argue against pricing legislation constantly changing and no doubt will attempt to repeat their so-called stimulus plan debacle when they announced the legislation was "too critical" to bother with reformist transparency requirements to enable full public scrutiny of legislation). I recall I had to freeze my dissertation proposal and my dissertation for weeks before my defenses--and yet the Democrats, who claim to be reformers, refuse to allow the freezing of major public policy legislation. There's only one reason for that--given enough public exposure, the taxpayers will rise up against bad legislation.
But taxpayers should think of an alternate extension of Pastor Niemöller's observation: first, Obama and his cronies came after high-income taxpayers ("because it's good to spread the wealth around"). But there's not enough income and assets of the wealthy elite to pay for the list price of Obamaian federal expansion programs. They can't get the money out of poor people without any appreciable assets; they already have some of the highest business tax brackets in the developed world (and businesses losing money during the recession aren't paying income taxes). And heaven knows we can't expect the rest of the world to continue buying T-bills to fund Obama's overspending. So where is Obama going to come next? The middle-income taxpayers may think they have Obama's assurances he won't ask them to pay more in taxes--but if they don't speak up while Democrats are decimating the American dream by punishing success, who is going to be left to speak for them when Obama needs even more money to pay for his initiatives?
Let me close by reminding the reader of that famous line from Shakespeare's Macbeth: "Something wicked this way comes": in our context, the taxman. The late, great George Harrison reminds us of the nature of the taxman below:
