Raising taxes on all those above $250,000 as Obama proposes would raise just $34 billion. That’s a whopping 3% of our $1.1 trillion deficit. Even if you seized all their income, it would only run the government for three months.
So the idea that taxing the wealthy will reduce the deficit is false. This is just class warfare, pure and simple.
Even so, Obama compounds the fib by going on to say his tax hike will have virtually no impact on small businesses. He notes, for example, that 97% of all small businesses would be untouched by his tax hike.
True, but irrelevant, as Treasury Department data show. For while there are 34.8 million small businesses in America, 30 million of those employ no workers.
Just 4.8 million, or 12%, employ workers. But an even smaller number — just 1.2 million — earn 91% of all the small business income. These are Obama’s “rich.”
But while they make up just 3% of all small businesses, they employ a stunning 54% of the total private U.S. workforce.
They are, in short, the nation’s job creators. And their owners, who report their small-business income on their personal income tax return, will be taxed at a higher rate by Obama.
So don’t be fooled. It’s not really the “wealthy,” as Obama says, who’ll get taxed. It’s small businesses. And it will have a devastating impact on jobs.
How devastating? A recent study by Ernst & Young noted that Obama’s tax hike, far from being “balanced,” would cost 700,000 people their jobs.
And it will no doubt kill hundreds of thousands if not millions more jobs in the future as would-be entrepreneurs decide not to start businesses in such a hostile tax and regulatory environment.
It’s important for us to realize that the people voting for Obama have no idea about these facts. A lot of people are annoyed that we lost the election last week. I think that if we want to win the next one then we have to start to think about becoming more persuasive with the people around us. We have to learn to deflate the slogans of those on the left with facts.
Sally C. Pipes is one of my favorite health care policy analysts. She has written several books on topics like the Canadian health care system, the American health care system, and the Obamacare health care law. She has debated health care with that damnable leftist Paul Krugman, among others. She heads up a think tank based in San Francisco, CA called the Pacific Research Institute.
Thanks to Obamacare, America’s corps of doctors appears to have a case of the blues.
The Physicians Foundation recently asked more than 13,000 doctors about their morale, their career plans, their practices and their views of the Affordable Care Act. The results were grim.
Nearly six in 10 doctors said that they are less positive about the future of health care in America under Obamacare. Almost two-thirds have a negative attitude toward their jobs – nearly twice as many as before the health law was passed in 2010.
As a result, many doctors are cutting back on their workload or shuttering their practices. Worse, their collective frustration is exacerbating our nation’s troubling doctor shortage.
More than three-fifths of doctors say they would retire today if they could, compared with 45 percent before Obamacare. Eighty-four percent say the medical profession is in decline. Fewer doctors say they would enter the profession today if they had it to do over again, and fewer would recommend it to their children.
This decline in doctors’ morale is taking a toll on Americans’ ability to access care. Physicians report working almost 6 percent fewer hours than they did four years ago. That’s about two and a half hours less per week per doctor. Add up all the hours, and it’s the equivalent of losing more than 44,000 full-time physicians.
Doctors also report seeing some 16 percent fewer patients than they did in 2008. That represents tens of millions fewer doctor-patient encounters each year.
More than half those surveyed say they plan to cut back further on the time they devote to patient care, to work part time, to retire or to switch to direct-pay “concierge”-type medical practices, which are beyond the reach of many of Obamacare’s rules and regulations.
Even before the law, America faced a chronic doctor shortage, with a gap of 14,000 physicians in 2010. And the problem will only grow worse.
According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, Obamacare will push the doctor shortage up to 63,000 by 2015 – and more than 91,000 by 2020. That’s in addition to the full-time-equivalent losses from doctors working fewer hours.
I have been talking to people in my office who voted for Obama all week to see why they did what they did. Surprisingly, not many people I talked to voted for him. But for those that did, a popular reason is that they wanted to tax the rich more. I asked them what would happen if you taxed the rich more. They told me that Obama can tax people who are “rich” more and more and that the “rich” will just keep paying those higher taxes while still continuing to work and work to provide the goods and services that we all use. I asked them about regulations, and they said that Obama can just keep heaping burdensome regulations on these “rich” people more and more, and they won’t mind at all. They’ll just keep working and hiring people and providing goods and services even if they make less money and have to work more to comply with regulations.
One of the Indian contractors who voted for Obama told me that rich people do what they do because they like it, and they will keep doing it no matter how much we tax and regulate them. “They will do it for love of fairness, and because Obama is such a good man – they will be inspired by him to pay the higher taxes and to fill in the extra paperwork”, he told me. For him, people just do whatever they like. The reason why some people work is because they like working, and the reason why some people don’t work is because they like not working. Another Obama-voter told me that people should be able to do whatever they like and everyone should end up equal in the end. Some people will work because they like to, and others won’t. Taxes don’t affect what a person does. Nor does the difficulty of the work. Nor does the exposure to malpractice lawsuits. Nor does the higher medical insurance premiums. Doctors do what they do because they like it, and the conditions and profit margins don’t matter. Rich people like doctors will keep working at whatever they do even if they are taxed so much that they earn the same amount of money as people who work at McDonald’s.
That’s the worldview of the people who voted for Obama. They don’t understand incentives at all. They don’t understand the profit motive. They think that people who go to medical school until they are 35, racking up tens of thousands of dollars in debt in the process, will be happy to work 80 hour weeks and to pay 50% of their income in taxes so that other people can have free contraceptives. That is the worldview of the left – they have no idea what the consequences are of raising taxes on “the rich”. They don’t think that there are any consequences.
If you would like to see Sally Pipes talk a bit more about Obamacare, you can watch her explain it here:
Fox News contributor Steven Crowder decided he would see how well children would take President Barack Obama’s redistribution of wealth idea when it was applied to their Halloween candy.
He went to a trick-or-treat tailgate and had children line up after they had collected their candy and Crowder redistributed it so that every child would have an equal amount.
Sure enough, they weren’t too thrilled.
“Dude that’s not cool,” said one upset child dressed as a baseball player. “It’s not fun to take people’s candy. This is my candy, I worked hard for it.”
Another little girl in a princess costume’s jaw dropped as Crowder dropped a handful of her candy in another child’s bag. She looked up to her parents in disbelief and near-tears as if to demand that they protest this injustice.
The video is an attempt to show the real effects of a popular Obama campaign point which is to, “make the rich pay their fair share,” or, in other words, redistribute the wealth of the rich to the poor, regardless of who earned the money in the first place.
“You just stole my candy,” yelled one kid dressed all in white who looked like he was ready for a fist-fight.
“Is that your costume? You didn’t make that shirt, you didn’t build that,” replied Crowder, referring to Obama’s famous quote where he told business owners that they owed something to the government because they didn’t build their own businesses.
“I’m gonna call the police!,” yelled another child who swarmed Crowder with a group of his friends who appeared to be getting aggressive. Some even tried to swat Crowder in the face.
To say the least, Crowder was far from popular that night, but his prank served its purpose. Redistribution, in the words of one angry trick-or-treater, “is just not fair.”
Hilarious! But the public schools will brainwash them to become little socialist zombies in due time. What else can we expect from unionized public school teachers but big government indoctrination?
WINTERY KNIGHT 