Washington State Democrats Plan to Confiscate Your Money if They Think You're Making Too Much

The time is coming, if Leftists get their way, when a government official can decide that you’re making too much money and confiscate all except what he, she, or xe decides you need. This is already happening, in effect, with federal, state, and municipal income taxes, but a new bill in Washington State is carrying the idea farther than it has ever before advanced in the United States. The bill proposes an “excess compensation tax” to level out the unfair advantage that overpaid people have. Who is overpaid? Anyone the Democrats target, of course.

Jason Rantz of Seattle’s KTTH explained Sunday that the “excess compensation tax” comes from SB 5767, “Funding health care access by imposing an excise tax on the annual compensation paid to certain highly compensated hospital employees,” which was introduced last Tuesday and referred to the Ways & Means committee. Rantz noted that “Democrats hope to tax specific job salaries at the behest of healthcare workers’ unions. But you’d be naïve to think they’ll stop there.” Of course they won’t stop there. This bill is one of the most open acknowledgments yet that Leftists are pursuing an avowedly socialist agenda, in which government wonks, not market factors, determine compensation.

This is the very heart of the difference between capitalist and socialist systems. Socialist nations have always quickly become economic basket cases, for the simple reason that they kill individual initiative by setting a ceiling on compensation. No matter how hard someone works, he or she earns what is determined by the state. In a capitalist society, an enterprising person can take another job or work longer hours so as to earn more money, and then what he or she does with that money is largely a matter of the worker’s own discretion. In a socialist society, by contrast, it’s useless to work long hours or take an extra job, because doing so isn’t going to bring in any more cash: the government will skim off any “excess compensation” that might have been due a hardworking person. And there isn’t even any impetus to work hard or do a good job, because one can’t get fired and suddenly be left without any means of support, either.

This is also why socialist systems lead straight to the gulag, and to walls and barbed wire around the country. If people can leave and have a chance to make a better life in some other country where government busybodies don’t confiscate their earnings, they will. Hence they have to be kept in by force. And if they don’t work hard at least when the commissar is watching, the prison camps await. Yet those camps are really just a microcosm of socialist society at large. The whole thing is a prison camp, in which one is working for the government and is at the government’s mercy. The only difference is that inside the camps, the workings of the society are more obvious, and the threat is more immediate.

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In Washington, the new bill “would pose a 7.5% ‘excise tax’ on hospital administrator jobs that Democrats deem overpaid. The bill defines ‘excess compensation’ as one that exceeds 10 times the average annual wage of workers statewide, as published by the Employment Security Department.” What would the state do with this money? Nothing good, of course: “The tax revenue would be used to ‘advance health equity’ and fund abortion.” Well, of course: nothing is more important to the Left than sacrificing children to Moloch. But why are the Democrats picking on hospital administrators in order to fund this scheme?

Rantz points out that “Democrats are targeting hospital administrators because it allows them to justify even more funding of abortions, but also because they have a mutually beneficial relationship with various unions that represent healthcare workers. Democrats give the unions what they want, and they get support and help with their campaigns.” The flip side of this, however, is that the more the Left makes the job of hospital administration one in which people’s wealth is confiscated and they cannot make a decent living, the fewer people will go into hospital administration. Healthcare quality in general will suffer, and the revenue that this tax scheme is designed to bring in will start failing to appear.

This would not, however, be anywhere close to the first time that Leftists killed the goose that laid the golden egg. Carrying out that particular execution, in fact, is a good deal of what Leftism is all about.