Ted Nugent, rock n’ roller and author, recently took the time to imagine what Thomas Jefferson would be thinking of the political situation on July 4, 2011. Nugent writes, “Jefferson would not be celebrating our independence, but rather encouraging Americans to revolt once again.” Nugent goes on to say that “Our federal government is more burdensome, costly and controlling than the British government of King George 275 years ago, the very beast that our Founding Fathers took up arms against.” Nugent goes on to encourage Americans to read the Declaration of Independence, which you can do by clicking here.
In another ode to freedom on July 4th, Thomas Sowell writes, “The American Revolution was not simply a rebellion against the king of England, it was a rebellion against being ruled by kings in general.” Sowell goes on to write about the exceptional American Constitution and how “to this very day, elites[…]— and they include many among the intelligentsia, as well as political messiahs — find the Constitution of the United States a real pain because it stands in the way of their imposing their will and their presumptions on the rest of us.”
The distortion of the mission and power of government at the federal level has led to vast overspending, borrowing, and taxation. The government and the Federal Reserve have gone to great lengths to hide the pain that will be caused by the repayment of this debt. As Pat Buchanan writes, “One Chinese economist is already accusing us of defaulting, as the Fed’s flooding of the world with dollars has seen the dollar lose 10 percent of its value against other currencies in the last year. Holding $1 trillion in U.S. debt, China has watched the purchasing power of that U.S. paper plummet. Understandably, Beijing fears that if we ever pay back all they have lent us, it will be in U.S. dollars of far lesser value.”
The administration has trotted out the “tax the rich” mantra common among liberals looking to incite class warfare before an election. Thomas Sowell says in another piece that this has already been tried and found to fail. He writes of the Coolidge administration:
The first time this political battle was fought, during the Coolidge administration, the tax-cutters won. The data show that “the rich” supplied less tax revenue to the government when the top income tax rate was 73 percent in 1921 than they supplied after the income tax rate was reduced to 24 percent in 1925.
Because high tax rates can easily be avoided, both then and now, “the rich” were much less affected by high tax rates than was the economy and the people who were looking for jobs. After the Coolidge tax cuts, the increased economic activity led to unemployment rates that ranged from a high of 4.2 percent to a low of 1.8 percent.
Mario Loyola concurs in his piece, The Folly of Soaking the Rich, in which he writes, “As a result of lower tax rates on the top income earners, not only do they pay a much larger share of all taxes, but they pay much more taxes total — and revenue to the government has increased. This is because lowering taxes on the rich creates more rich people and richer rich people. The federal government gets much more revenue if you impose a 40 percent tax on a large number of very wealthy millionaires than if you impose a 70 percent tax on a small number of less wealthy millionaires.” The evidence supporting the superiority of small government is provided by Art Laffer and Ford Scudder, quoted in Loyola’s piece:“In the year Ronald Reagan took office (1981) the top 1% of income earners as reflected by the Adjusted Gross Income of all tax filers paid 17.58 % of all federal income taxes. Twenty-five years later, in 2005 the top 1% paid 39.8% of all income taxes, representing a greater than doubling of the share of tax payments made by this group.”
