Dems Practice Class Warfare in Limousine/Gulfstream Flyover Country

The Wall Street Journal has a great editorial on the Socialists-In-Waiting tax policy.

the top 1% of taxpayers, those who earn above $388,806, paid 40% of all income taxes in 2006, the highest share in at least 40 years. The top 10% in income, those earning more than $108,904, paid 71%. Barack Obama says he's going to cut taxes for those at the bottom, but that's also going to be a challenge because Americans with an income below the median paid a record low 2.9% of all income taxes, while the top 50% paid 97.1%. Perhaps he thinks half the country should pay all the taxes to support the other half.

This tax level would seem confiscatory to all but the lunatics who think the Obamanable Showman's statement that the rich AREN'T TAXED ENOUGH is the problem. Here's the WSJ preaching to the loons:

Aha, we are told: The rich paid more taxes because they made a greater share of the money. That is true. The top 1% earned 22% of all reported income. But they also paid a share of taxes not far from double their share of income. In other words, the tax code is already steeply progressive.

We also know from income mobility data that a very large percentage in the top 1% are "new rich," not inheritors of fortunes. There is rapid turnover in the ranks of the highest income earners, so much so that people who started in the top 1% of income in the 1980s and 1990s suffered the largest declines in earnings of any income group over the subsequent decade, according to Treasury Department studies of actual tax returns. It's hard to stay king of the hill in America for long.

The most amazing part of this story is the leap in the number of Americans who declared adjusted gross income of more than $1 million from 2003 to 2006. The ranks of U.S. millionaires nearly doubled to 354,000 from 181,000 in a mere three years after the tax cuts.

Yet the MSM keeps their anvil chorus clanging about how terrible the economy is, though technically it isn't in recession. What gives? I guess that a certain percentage ARE suffering, sometimes from bad due diligence on their part & the banks with the mortgage crisis, and sometimes from their own extravagance, and sometimes from sheer bad luck. However, the "BAD" economy is being foisted on what the left likes to call "the masses" who the left thinks will believe them rather than their own lyin' eyes. And of course, GWB employs his hopelessly out-of-date fratboy insouciance in trying to counter, in his bumbling fashion, the agitprop from the in-the-tank MSM.

SUPPLY SIDE ECONOMICS WORKS!!!

This is precisely what supply-siders predicted would happen with lower tax rates on capital gains, dividends and income. The economy and earnings would grow faster, which they did; investors would declare more capital gains and companies would pay out more dividends, which they did; the rich would invest less in tax shelters at lower tax rates, so their tax payments would rise, which did happen.

The idea that this has been a giveaway to the rich is a figment of the left's imagination. Taxes paid by millionaire households more than doubled to $274 billion in 2006 from $136 billion in 2003. No President has ever plied more money from the rich than George W. Bush did with his 2003 tax cuts. These tax payments from the rich explain the very rapid reduction in the budget deficit to 1.9% of GDP in 2006 from 3.5% in 2003.

This year, thanks to the credit mess and slower growth, taxes paid by the rich may fall and the deficit will rise. (The nonstimulating tax rebates will also hurt the deficit.) Mr. Obama proposes to close this deficit by raising tax rates on the rich to their highest levels since the late 1970s. The very groups like the Congressional Budget Office and Tax Policy Center that wrongly predicted that the 2003 investment tax cuts would cost about $1 trillion in lost revenue are now saying that repealing those tax cuts would gain similar amounts. We'll wager it'd gain a lot less.

We have to go back to the hopelessly incompetent James Earl Carter to duplicate the effects that Obama's economy-wrecking lunacy might effect---remember those 15% mortgage rates? The Seven Economic Policies in Four Years? The Windfall Profits Tax? Everything that made Jimmy the worst domestic economy in the twentieth century will give Obama the worst in the 21st.

If Mr. Obama does succeed in raising tax rates on the rich, we'd also wager that the rich share of tax payments would fall. The last time tax rates were as high as the Senator wants them -- the Carter years -- the rich paid only 19% of all income taxes, half of the 40% share they pay today. Why? Because they either worked less, earned less, or they found ways to shelter income from taxes so it was never reported to the IRS as income.

The way to soak the rich is with low tax rates, and last week's IRS data provide more powerful validation of that proposition.

The fact that investments & tax breaks grow the economy never reaches the Bolshie-trained Keynesians of the ueber-left academicide elites. Read Amity Schlaes The Forgotten Man for a good dose of reality versus the Krugboy bong-induced shroom world that Obama would project.