Apr 16, 2009 — Tea party protests belie real issues about gov’t spending
\nThe tea party protests around the country yesterday were quite a phenomenon. But they were not really about taxes in Clark’s opinion.<\/p>\n
Sure, our tax code is incredibly labyrinthine. After all, the consumer champ’s taxes were 169 pages long this year!<\/p>\n
However, our tax rate is actually more favorable now than it’s been in recent decades — as strange as that may sound. The average family pays 9 cents on the dollar in taxes, according to an article in The Washington Post. Meanwhile, a new Gallup poll shows that roughly half of Americans are happy with the level of tax they pay.<\/p>\n
In Clark’s case, his financial success means that his tax rate was effectively 34.3% this past year. That’s not particularly low, although it could have been much higher; at other points in our nation’s history, it has actually been as much as 90% for the wealthy!<\/p>\n
So if taxes aren’t the real issue with the protests, then what is? The penny-pincher believes it is concern over government spending\u2026and this is not a partisan issue. Former President George W. Bush was a huge spender and the Obama administration looks like it is heading down that same path.<\/p>\n
Adding to the general unease people are feeling is the fact that we’ve perverted capitalism with the way both administrations handled bank failures and the collapse of the auto industry.<\/p>\n
The banks should have been allowed to go insolvent. That’s why we have the FDIC. But they weren’t and now we’re in a neverland: Are institutions like Bank of America and Citibank private or are they public? Are they serving stockholders or the taxpayers?<\/p>\n
Ditto with the auto industry. How absurd is it that President Obama basically fired the CEO of GM after the company got a bailout?! Again, it leaves us in a gray area similar to the bank conundrum.<\/p>\n
When you’re sitting at the crux between capitalism and government control, you’re lost in the ozone. Clark compares it to the phrase “you can’t be a little bit pregnant.”<\/p>\n
We need a hard restart back to the basic tenets of capitalism. If businesses can’t make a go of it, they should fail and the stockholders should be wiped out. Period. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Apr 16, 2009 — Tea party protests belie real issues about gov’t spending The tea party protests around the country yesterday were quite a phenomenon. But they were not really about taxes in Clark’s opinion. Sure, our tax code is incredibly labyrinthine. After all, the consumer champ’s taxes were 169 pages long this year! However, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[64,66,65],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=506"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}