07/31/2011
Re: Pat Buchanan’s article What 'Big Deals' Did to America
From: Rob Builder
I like what Pat has to say, with one large exception.
Attending an engineering university, I learned there is a difference between relative numbers and absolute numbers. Of course, I lean to hard numbers, by nature. Too many from both political parties love non-absolute numbers and thus can fool us most of the time.
We hear talk about raising taxes by Reagan, Bush 41 and so on, but I have never heard anyone, including Pat, cut away the fat.
If you have noted, thanks to such web sites as vdare.com, that many corporations, such as Microsoft and GE, pay either no taxes or virtually no taxes, you may still have missed the other "no taxers or virtually no taxers". Who are they? Well, two names come to mind: Rockefeller and Ford. So how can I be so sure?
Well, it may be forgotten by some, but a discovery of the Reece Committee in the 1950s opened my eyes to one way the wealthy avoid paying taxes.
The Ford family was specifically mentioned, as are the Rockefellers. (Nelson Rockefeller, when interviewed to become vice president, said he was only worth 30 million dollars. But how many tax exempt foundations are controlled by his family?)
Now I’m talking the super rich, not the upper middle class, who according to David Cay Johnston’s book, Free Lunch were already were paying 27% of the taxes when that book was published. Of course, another tax avoidance scheme for the super rich are the tax exempt municipal bonds.
And lest I ignore Johnston’s book Perfectly Legal, let me make a plug for that as well, and one may realize that the very people, who have retained the incredible power to strongly influence, if not dictate government policy, pay so little in taxes, if any at all, for all intents and purposes non-tax payers.
Let me suggest that taxes are for people, who work for a living, not for those, who do not.
Yes, if we taxed at 100% the wealth of the super rich, we could not pay off the national debt. But if we taxed them at the proportions the rest of us pay and took away their influence, I would bet the national debt would decline precipitously — and middle class America would not be disappearing.
See Rob Builder’s previous letter here.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.