The most-viewed post in the history of this blog is the “riding in the wagon” cartoon, but the post that has received the highest number of star-ratings is my video on class warfare.
I hope that means people share my concerns about the destructive and punitive mentality of so many of the kleptocrats in Washington.
Speaking of which, I debated one of those people on Bloomberg TV.
We got a decent amount of time, so a lot of topics were discussed. Here are the ones that merit a comment or two.
- Stealing all the income of the rich wouldn’t be enough to finance big government, though I should have used the three-month figure Mattie Duppler shared in her video indictment of Obama’s tax policy.
- There should be a cap so that nobody has to pay more than 25 percent of their income to government. I actually think that’s far too high, but polling data shows that this is a good way of framing the issue.
- Our fiscal problem is an excessive burden of government spending.
- Entitlement reform must be part of the answer.
- My opponent says higher taxes are patriotic, so I guess he belongs in the same category as Joe Biden and Francois Hollande. I guess we’ll call them the Three Stooges of statism.
- He also claims that it would be “fair” to go back to Bill Clinton’s top tax rate, but anybody want to bet that Michael will now call for even higher tax rates now that Obama succeeded in pushing the top rate to 39.6 percent?
- And we definitely know he doesn’t want to go back to Bill Clinton spending levels, so he wants the bad part of the 1990s but not the good part.
- Michael asserts that the United States is a low-tax nation, simply because we don’t tax as much as Europe. But, given the economic stagnation and lower living standards on the other side of the Atlantic, why would anybody want to mimic those failed welfare states.
- Unsurprisingly, I make my typical point about how we can balance the budget if we merely limit federal spending so that it grows 2.5 percent annually. In other words, Mitchell’s Golden Rule leads to good results.
- But I do agree with Michael that payroll taxes are too high (not that this is what he really thinks), though I should have echoed my January 2 post and said that those taxes should be reduced as part of genuine Social Security reform.
One point I failed to emphasize, though, is that class-warfare taxes won’t raise much revenue because of Laffer Curve effects. My comments about successful people escaping places like France and California touched on the issue, but I should have been much more explicit.
P.S. Was I right, or was I right, when I wrote that the real national title game was played on December 1? Such a tragedy that Georgia fell four yards short of the championship.
Since ‘Bama trounced Notre Dame by 28 points and edged Georgia by 4 points, I guess that means the Bulldawgs would have crushed the Irish by 24 points. Which would have been even more impressive than when we beat them 17-10 to win the 1980 national championship.