Tom Toles for February 06, 2015

What did Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Steve Jobs ever do to deserve a high salary?Says the liberal on his laptop and IPhone.

the Top Hat should be coming back. It would let us know how to recognize the top 400 if we see them.

One mistake we seem prone to fall into these days is equating income with wealth. They are of course connected, but not as directly as might be supposed. Imagine someone graduating from college with a big student load, getting married and having a couple kids to raise and put through college, having difficulty getting started in a career … what if at age 60 he is finally making $200,000 a year, a large portion of which must still go to mortgage payments or be saved for a quickly approaching retirement.His situation is completely different from another man whose parents paid for his education, bought him his first house, set up a trust fund he could draw from for capital, and through their connections saw him established in a good career earning $200,000 a years at age 25, with no children of his own yet, with his income structured so that most of it will be classed as capital gains, and so taxed at a lower rate than wages.The two have identical incomes, but are not remotely in the same financial situation.

Excellent exposition of the situation. Too bad it’s lost on ConGov.

Your comment about the salary disparity reminds me of my frustration in the eighties, when I, an itinerant Speech pathologist, learned that the physicians serving in the nursing homes I worked in were collecting eighteen bucks per person for signing off on the charts. They rarely saw the patients…and when they did, they usually just dropped in to say hello, whole operation taking less than two hours. One time, the doctor ordered that all the chart be delivered to his office (illegally, I might add) so he wouldn’t even have to set foot in the place. Meanwhile, the docs would complain that the patients were still in their beds at 10 am; never mind that the CNAs, had eight to ten patients to take care of, serving breakfast, feeding some, changing diapers, bathing and dressing people, making beds, etc. etc. (and getting no respect) were being paid three bucks and change per hour. I opined to one nurse that the docs and CNAs should be earning each other’s pay. I still think so.

actually Harley, 13% of millions of bucks hurts a lot less than 13% of say, 30,000 or 50,000 bucks…Shucks, the first 13% (of millions) isn"teven “beer money” to those guys.

Just chiming in to agree with @SizeofaPea. I don’t mind that some people have large wealth! I just don’t like them using it to hurt everybody with less monty than they have, and getting the law changed to favor them, and then offshoring everything so that the lickspittle government doesn’t even get their crumbs.

It’s not the wealth; it’s the cheating.

“I also thought taxes were to raise revenue, not some wealth envy class warfare tool of the liberal.” If taxes were ONLY to raise revenue, then there would be no deductions for, say mortgage interest. They exist to encourage people to buy houses. Or deductions for supporting dependent children. Or for anything else, actually. Before there was an income tax, alcohol was taxed to, in part, discourage drinking. In short, from the foundation of the United States and the days of the foundingfathers, and, in fact long before that, the tax code has been used to encourage one sort of behavior or discourage another sort of behavior. From 1787 onwards, tariffs on imported goods were instituted to encourage people to “buy American.” They have been used by every party and every administration to influence behavior. And yes, in the name of fairness, to take more from the rich, even proportionally, than from the rest. During the American Revolution and long before, a property tax was laid on coaches and carriages (pleasure vehicles only the affluent owned) but not on wagons and other utilitarian vehicles. Similarly, taxes have been paid to provide for the necessities of the poor (however each generation chooses to define “necessities” and “the poor”) for many many centuries. In America this was done both before and after independence. This was done even when the poor were not permitted to vote, and power was confined to free adult white male property-owning protestant Christians. So if you want a country where the rich are never taxed to provide for the poor, and never expected to pay a larger share than other people, they you’re going to have to look for someplace other than America or Britain, or to a time remote in history. Considering further that the rich continue to get richer at a much faster rate than the rest of us, even in this administration, it is utter absurd to suggest that we are doing anything remotely like “taxing the rich out of [being] rich” as you say. In short, historically and factually, you seem to be living in a fantasy world of your own creation. If there is any evidence for class warfare, it quite evident from the figures that it is the class at the top who is winning, hands down. If there is class warfare going on, for the poor and the middle class it is presently a rear-guard action, as they are losing ground, foot by foot.

I like how Peabrain and you other lefties want to decide who should be allowed to be successful.Did you guys hear that you can move to Cuba now?

^And the fantasy world continues.

I usually don’t reply to Harly, but just to keep the historical record straight, here’s a passage from the wiki article on Saul Alinsky:

Alinsky did not join political parties. When asked during an interview whether he ever considered becoming a Communist party member, he replied:

Not at any time. I’ve never joined any organization—not even the ones I’ve organized myself. I prize my own independence too much. And philosophically, I could never accept any rigid dogma or ideology, whether it’s Christianity or Marxism. One of the most important things in life is what Judge Learned Hand described as ‘that ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you’re right.’ If you don’t have that, if you think you’ve got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated. The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide.

So how do we correct the situation?

I was going to post again, but now have no need. You spoke for me, especially your last paragraph. Too many CEO’s and other top corporate officers are being given obscene compensation, and get it even when they fail, and drive the company downwards.

“As for tariffs, that is not a tax on my labor.”

Of course it is. Import tariffs raise the price of goods sold here. Because of the tariff, you have to pay a higher price. An import tariff is a tax on your income. Fair Tax? I read Neal Boortz’s book. Buy a painting by a neighborhood artist, and there’s a whopping sales tax. Buy a Rembrandt, or a thousand acres of land, and there is no tax because those are second-hand goods. Now who do you suppose would benefit from that arrangement. But I understand why the proposal is popular with a certain crowd. If the tax code is simply and rigid, you remove half the tools in the legislative toolbox. If your purpose is to make the nation impotent, there’s a lot to be said for it.

One of the fundamental purposes of government is, in the words of the U.S. Constitution, to establish justice. Establish justice. Or, as you prefer to say, “make it fair.” Perfect fairness and perfect justice are impossible, true. But making things fairer IS what government is all about. And you’re really talking out of both sides of your mouth anyway. You don’t like the present tax code, why? Because you don’t think it’s fair! You want to change it, why? To make it fair! You’re not against fairness, Harley. You just want it to be YOUR idea of fairness. But we each have an idea of what is fair, and we each, of course, want everyone else to follow our idea, and we each want the laws to be fair as we understand fairness. Wanting laws that are just, laws that are fair, is not crying to “mommy government.” Or if it is, you are doing it just as much as anyone else.

You always sneer at mommy government. And yet, you know what? The majority of American citizens are women.

I didn’t actually know if Saul Alinsky was a communist or not, so I decided to check it out. Harley clearly didn’t check it out before posting. Or maybe Harley is talking about a different person — Saul’s distant cousin Sal.