◼ All-Purpose Scapegoats: Fiscal-cliff deal won’t end the Democrat war against “the rich.” - Robert Stacy McCain/American Spectator
Good-bye, “tax cuts for the rich.” If the legislation passed on New Year’s Day means nothing else, it should at least put an end to a rhetorical trope that Democrats have been pounding for the past decade. This has been the essence of the Democrat party’s economic message since the enactment of the “Bush tax cuts” in 2002: Everything that is wrong with the economy — and with the federal budget — can be attributed to the fact that the rich aren’t paying enough taxes....
Americans have been repeatedly told in recent years that “the rich” (however that term is defined) are not paying “their fair share” of taxes, and that this greedy unfairness is the explanation of anything that needs explaining. Did the local factory lay off workers? The rich are not paying their fair share! Is your daughter struggling to repay her student loans? The rich are not paying their fair share!
Especially in the “swing states” during last year’s election campaign, voters heard this Democrat message so often, in so many iterations, that it must have seemed like the universal panacea, a sort of snake-oil miracle cure. Whatever your problem — obesity, dandruff, halitosis, chronic flatulence — the Democrats promised to cure it by finally forcing the rich to Pay Their Fair Share. This message proved to be amply satisfactory to people too stupid or too lazy to bother themselves with arithmetic. Perhaps it is not entirely a coincidence that comparatively few of those math-deficient voters are themselves rich....
Sen. Rand Paul explained this in a New Year’s Eve floor speech before he voted against the deal. “Mark my word, you will raise tax rates and you’ll feel good because you went out there and you got those rich people,” the Kentucky Republican told his colleagues before they voted 89-8 in favor of the bill. “You campaigned against rich people and you got enough envy whipped up in the country, and you’re going to stick it to those rich people. But guess what? You may not get any more revenue. You may not get any more economic growth. But you can say, ‘I stuck it to the rich people.’”
