Monday, September 26, 2011

A Fair Share

Andrew McCarthy wants to know what the 'fair' share of ones income and wealth is the proper amount for government to seize.

With its leader having proposed to expand our deflating economy by redistributing another $1.5 trillion from private-sector producers to public-sector gluttons, the Obama Left’s talking point du jour is: “We are just asking the rich to pay their fair share.” The point here is not to rehearse the illogic of that assertion. The top earners in the economy already pay all of the income tax and virtually all of the taxes, period. You could look it up.

What I’d like to home in on is the single number the president and his diminishing ranks studiously ignore — the “x” in the equation that never quite gets a value assigned. “Fair share” — what is it?
Want to make a cable-news Democratic party-strategist squirm? Ask her what she means by the “fair share” that must be paid by the rich. (No point further tarrying over what she means by “the rich,” since we already know they are billionaires and millionaires who jump about in corporate jets while somehow making only $200,000 a year.) In response to the “fair share” question, you will hear how Bush single-handedly destroyed the economy. You will hear about the diabolical Republican plan to desert the elderly, starve the young, and exploit everyone in between. You will hear a vague concession that “the rich” must be allowed to keep some semblance of their wealth — enough, at least, to keep them in the game of “paying it forward” to future generations of government wards. But what you won’t hear is a number.

This week, I had the pleasure of watching the Fox Business Channel’s Stuart Varney expertly press the Obama Left’s glib evaders on the subject. How much is a “fair share,” he doggedly inquired? A quarter? A third? Should the rich have to split their take 50-50 with Leviathan? Or is their success such a blight on social justice that the government (and the Teamsters, and the teachers’ unions, and the basket-case blue states) should get something much closer to all of it?

No answer. They cannot answer it.

The rest here.

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