It Tolls for Thee

Came across three big links to this New Geography piece over the last couple days, so I figured I’d better finally sit down and read it. Because what it looks like is, if my sons do pursue any of the careers I’ve been nudging them towards, I might just be nudging them towards human bondage. Read:

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Ironically the new taxes will have relatively little effect on the detested Romney uber-class, who derive most of their income from capital gains, taxed at a much lower rate. They also have access to all manner of offshore dodges. Nor will it have much impact on Silicon Valley millionaires and billionaires, or the Hollywood moguls and urban land speculators who constitute the Democratic Party’s “good rich,” and enjoy many of the same privileges as their wealthy conservative counterparts.

The people whose wallets will be drained in the new war on “the rich” are high-earning, but hardly plutocratic professionals like engineers, doctors, lawyers, small business owners and the like. Once seen as the bastion of the middle class, and exemplars of upward mobility, these people are emerging as the modern day “kulaks,” the affluent peasants ruthlessly targeted by Stalin in the early 1930s.

It never was about taxing the rich. We know this. Unless taxes are flatter and far, far simpler, the rich just don’t have to pay like we do. There’s no loophole for that little fishing boat you’ve been saving for, but John Kerry can keep his yacht wherever.

There’s big money to be squeezed from the upper-middle class, but that’s only the beginning. The real money is smack-dab in the middle of the middle class. You’d hardly know it, what with declining real wages and declining household net worth. But the middle class makes decent money, and they make it every two weeks, and goddamn that beast in Washington must be fed.

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If they can’t squeeze it out of you through withholding, they’ll squeeze it out of you through ever-more-expensive insurance you’re required to buy — and which they now tax. They’ll get it out of you by taxing the pacemaker your mom needs. They’ll tax the bejeebus out of your utility company, with the “savings” passed on to you. They’ll make your car more expensive with new CAFE rules. If you hang on to your old car, they’ll make you pay through a VAT or whatever scheme comes next to bleed you dry.

You’re made to pay because they need your money to buy the vote of the guy who makes one less dollar than you do, and who can’t get by without his ObamaPhone and wants another hundred bucks on his EBT card. It’s not his fault — he’s just taking advantage of the system. And you aren’t.

We live in the Welfare State. Act accordingly.

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