from The People’s Cube

Obama’s pre-election story is that taxing the rich is the key to funding the government and reducing the debt. Even his greatly expanded government will be financed by the rich paying their fair share.

This story is for people who do not understand anything at all about current government spending and the staggering size of our debt. Obama’s story is for uninformed voters. The question is, do the uninformed represent a majority yet?

Lying about the revenue available from taxing “the rich” may get votes, but it won’t change reality. Do the math. There is not remotely, in your wildest dreams, enough money to cover the spending of this government with increased taxes on top earners. The math has been explained many places, including here, and here, and here.

Obama’s proposed ‘tax the rich’ plan will solve about 5% of our deficit problem. And that assumes that productive people will not change their behavior in response to higher taxes, an unlikely assumption. Mike Flynn has just written a good summary of the absurdity of the plan. Others have shown that even if you take all the income from the top 1%, you can only finance this bloated government for a few months. And then what? The golden geese will be dead. Where would you get eggs next year?

France is going to learn this lesson ahead of us. France just elected a Socialist President who rode the class envy train to power. He is promising to tax top earners at 75%. Socialists have the delusion that you can take most of the product of someone’s labor and the person will keep working just as hard. Reality has never worked that way and never will.

Now, France’s richest businessman, Bernard Arnault, is leaving the country. As Daniel Greenfield reports, This Atlas is Shrugging. Arnault, the head of Louis Vuitton, employs 100,000 people in France and around the world. Many other people of substance are fleeing France. The French “Liberation” newspaper reported Arnault’s departure with this headline: “Get lost, rich bastard!”

Yes, you golden geese, you get the hell out. And Liberation people, talk to me in a year or two about how your socialist delusion works out for you. I already know how it works out because this is an old movie with a tragic ending. Reality always bats last.

Another aspect of overwhelming debt that is not discussed often enough is the close relationship between debt and national security. When Admiral Michael Mullen was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a reporter asked him to name the most significant threat to U.S. national security. His response was, “Our debt”.

On Monday, speaking to a panel of former members of Congress, Admiral Mullen elaborated on the dire implications of America’s fiscal path to our national security:

“A nation with our current levels of unsustainable debt, being this far out of fiscal balance, cannot hope to sustain for very long its superiority from a military perspective, or its influence in world affairs. That was not intended as a partisan statement then, and it has no partisan meaning now. I was using our growing and unsustainable debt as shorthand for the abundant disorder in our fiscal house, brought upon us, by ourselves, by our own doing. While much has been said since then, little has changed. In fact, I would argue that the mere passage of time, combined with a lack of solutions in the interim, has compounded the problem, as our debt increases seemingly exponentially, and solutions that require compromise seem a figment of the imagination.”