Maybe it was in North Vietnam that John McCain subconsciously learned the art of self-immolation. As the cap’n of the Good Ship McCain and his boat went glug, gluggity, glug on Thursday night, I wondered who planted the microchip in the old sailor’s brain that forced him to make Barack Obama’s talking points for him.
Captain McCain: Please stop saying we are the party that isn’t cool with spreading the wealth around. We like to create wealth through low taxes and freedom and watch it spread itself around. The other party likes to destroy wealth because they think wealth is unfair. Obama’s gargantuan tax hike in the midst of a recession is going to be a shock to the economy that’s worse than hitting a man when he’s down; it’s more like stepping on his trachea.
Obama makes so many absurd statements (“One hundred percent, John, of your ads – 100% of them – have been negative”) that it is sometimes difficult to even parse what he meant to say, but when he talks about how his tax plan is going to make people like “Warren Buffet” pay “a little more,” I beg to differ.
Obamanomics means punitive taxation for those couples who make more than $250,000 a year – or $125,000 per working person. While I have long supported the wealthy in theory, it has been a strange feeling to be told, all of this year, that I am an official, card-carrying member of the plutocracy, especially by a guy from a household that made $4.2 million last year, or nearly $4.1 million more than I made. Now I know the meaning of Bob Dylan’s words: “What’s good is bad, what’s bad is good, you’ll find out when you reach the top, you’re on the bottom.” It boggles the mind that the following could possibly be true in 2009 America but, thanks to the blithering of Sen. McLame, here it is. Now that I’ve reached the bottom of the top, what happens with my marginal income (the next dollar I earn) is that most of it is going to be seized by the government. Obama is raising my federal income tax to 40%, plus a 4% social security surcharge. State and local taxes top me up to something like 54%. Just for fun, I pay all sorts of other taxes: sales tax, capital gains taxes, dividend taxes. As jobs dry up, Obama’s big idea is to give people less incentive to work hard and hire one another. Why bother, when 54 cents out of every buck goes to the government?
I don’t claim to be poor but I always thought that when I became “rich” I would be issued a top hat or some serfs. Certainly I thought that the “rich” must own something more valuable than a sofa; I’ve never owned a home or even a car. I don’t even own a kitchen table. There’s no room for one in the apartment I share with 1.25 other humans. My wife and I eat dinner on the one non-coffee table that fits in our living room, a combination desk/mail dump/computer workstation heaped with notebooks and magazines and cables and remote controls. Usually, the prospect of dining at said table involves so much reorganizing that we eat sitting on our sofa, like college students.
McCain is the first Republican presidential candidate I’ve ever seen who is unable to articulate the central idea of our party, the one that has been winning us elections for 30
years: We charge less. We want you to keep your money and build wealth. Again and again, McCain allows Obama to get away with saying President Bush “cut taxes for the rich” when in reality he cut them for everyone, or that McCain would “give tax breaks to Big Oil,” when his policy is to decrease taxes for all corporations. McCain neglects to point out that Democrats always claim they’re going to raise taxes on somebody else, but when the IOUs come due they come to pick your pocket and call it “investment.” Bill Clinton promised a middle class tax cut that turned out to mean tax increases for everyone who makes $20,000 a year or more.
When President Kennedy took office and started to whittle marginal tax rates down from an astonishing 91%, he said, “An economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenues to balance our budget just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits . . . the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.” An old sailor like McCain should understand better than anybody what Kennedy meant when he said, “A rising tide lifts all the boats.”