Paying it forward…

“I hear all this, “You know, well, this is class warfare. This is whatever.” No! There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody! You built a factory out there? Good for you! But I want to be clear: You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You, uh, were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory and hire someone to protect against this because of the work the rest of us did.
Now, look: You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea, God bless! Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.” — Elizabeth Warren

Warren gives a false and misleading narrative by interjecting infrastructure into the equation. “Focusing on infrastructure as the crucial support of entrepreneurial activity is like crediting the guy who built young Bill Gates’ garage with the start of Microsoft. Yes, Gates needed a roof over his head, and garages are useful. But it was Gates who had the ambition to do more in his garage than store his car and lawn-care products.” — Rich Lowry, National Review

In truth it was that factory owner, and others like him, that built that road in the first place, not the “rest of us”. These “rich” that she rails against pay by far the largest portion of the taxes in America, with the middle class picking up just a fraction of the rest. A whole 50% of our country pays no tax whatsoever, with many getting money back via tax credits they never paid in in the first place.

It’s people like Warren, those that cry for a share something unearned from those that earned it, which have caused the majority of the grief this country is suffering right now. Programs meant to help have actually done more harm. The “affordable home loan” program is a perfect example of that. The very idea that somehow making unqualified people eligible for home loans was flawed from the very beginning as it did nothing to help people that couldn’t afford those homes in the first place pay for them. All it did was give them hope while setting them up for failure and heartbreak. And we were warned for years that what happened would happen.

Seriously, and in all actuality, ALL taxes are paid by the end user. Taxes on “the rich” are only added costs passed on to the consumer. Raising taxes only serves to raise prices that the poor can ill afford to pay. They don’t really want you to know that part of it, that taxing the rich is really just adding hurt to those that can least afford it – the poor.

Warren and her ilk have pushed the false narrative that Bush’s tax cut are what increased the deficit. This popular meme gets a lot of political play, but its far from true. After those tax cuts unemployment fell from over 6% to just over 4%. Revenue to the treasury INCREASED 44%. The increase in the deficit came from the aftermath and response to 9/11, fighting 2 wars, and the massive amounts spent on the recovery from hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Somehow all that is forgotten. If not for those tax cuts and the resulting stimulus it gave to the economy the small (and decreasing) deficit Bush left would be much larger.

Fact is that the projected (and feared) costs associated with the Healthcare changes along with the crash of our economy caused by a ill conceived meddling in the home loan industry, two programs championed by Warren and her crowd, have caused massive unemployment and hardship for the very people they pretend to support. Now, by going after the very people that can pull us out of this mess they created, will only delay and degrade any recovery for our economy and our people. The Soviet Union fell victim to the socialist idea that the masses could ride the backs of the producer to prosperity. It didn’t happen for them, and it won’t happen for us.

We need to grow our economy to provide jobs for people. Jobs are what spreads wealth, not handouts. To grow jobs you must have incentives to invest in the future. The “wealthy” don’t hide their money in mattresses, nor do they bury it in jars in the backyard, they invest it. They take their profits, put them out into the community to grow and make more profits. To grow those profits it takes investment, expansion, new construction, and people. Taxes take away from that.

To build a new factory not only provides jobs for those that will work at that factory, but jobs for builders of the materials that go into that factory, jobs for people that transport that material to and from, jobs for construction workers, jobs for people to feed and clothe those people, to house those people, and to service that new factory, the gas stations, grocery stores, etc. etc. That’s paying it forward. That’s how you get things done for the people, not stifling and taking away the means.

John F. Kennedy once said, “Don’t ask what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” Seems some in that crowd don’t understand what he meant by that.

-Al