Taxing the Affluent Rich

Dr. Hussein Biobrain, in his manifest frustration, has now bailed out on our "debate" over the Democratic Party's class warfare. He does, however, have a new post up that's typical of the puerile fare you'll find there, "Upper-Class Idiots." As always, I'm blown away at the explicit demonization of working professionals with regards to the Obama administration's plans to soak high-income earners. The progressive numbskulls at Lawyers, Guns and Money even have a post up entitled, "Working Hard or Hardly Working?" And here's the key passage:

Personal income levels are excellent proxies for measuring the extent to which people are "working hard" in this sense of hard work ... In other words, our society on average consists of people who "work hard" who make lots of money and people who don't. Higher marginal taxes on high earners thus have a net effect of moving wealth from relatively hard working people to relatively lazy people.

If you think about it for five seconds it's actually totally implausible that the correlation between "hard work" in this sense and increasing income is even mildly positive. To believe it is, you have to believe that highly paid high status professionals hate their work far more than working class people who are doing dangerous, physically taxing, and/or extremely boring work for low pay.

I'm going to be writing more on all of this, since we're in the middle of huge national debate over individualism versus statism. But in the meantime check out this episode from Tigerhawk TV, "Who Are These "Rich' People?" Tigerhawk, in his reasonable and eminently considerate fashion, explains how the "working affluent" not only work much harder than those at lower income levels, but are MORE PRODUCTIVE overall, and that taxing individuals and families like this will indeed put the final nail in the coffin of the current economy:

There's another point I'll mention here on all of this. The leftists have latched onto the idea that the "tea parties" against the administration's are simply about taxes and outrage "that someone else might get a bigger piece of pie than them." But's the protests and the backlash against taxing the "working affluent" are all of a piece. As Paul Hsieh notes at Pajamas Media:

America’s future is at stake. Do we want to enlarge an already-bloated welfare state that tramples on our rights and strangles the economy? Or do we want a limited government that protects our rights and allows individuals to prosper and thrive?

These are the questions that the Democratic-leftists will have to address as they continue to push for the biggest expansion of government in American history.