Not really. He comes across to me as scared shitless. He thinks he is at risk of losing everything (he is, we all are) and he’s willing to deal with the devil to keep a little of what he’s got. A case of the old Nazi Germany tale of the Jewiah merchant who kept saying “surely it won’t get worse than this” straight up until he boarded the train for the camp.
Not really Stein has always said these kinds of things on TV in the last couple of years.
Ben if free to send in extra if he wants. But he should be honest about how government is going to spend his money. In the previous year, it created jobs that on average cost the taxpayers over $120,000 per year. And this is compared to the median household income of $52,026. In other words, every dollar that we allow the federal government to spend, it gets less than 50% in value.
No, it’s not. He’s been saying this for years. He’s consistent.
A high income does not mean you are rich.
Ben the Crazy Uncle has been saying this for years, to anybody who listened. He was just as wrong then as he is now.
I saw through Stein’s act 10 years ago. I was not at all surprised that he supported funny boy’s fraudulent election.
Same song, different verse. Raising taxes only means the government continues overspending. 1.5 trillion dollars - $4,800 for every person in the nation. That’s almost 10 percent of all earnings per capita, and that’s just the overspending. That doesn’t even come close to start digging into reduce the national debt.
It is impossible to tax your way out of this type of deficit, there’s no way to capture ten percent of the nation’s GDP on top of all the rest of the taxes without destroying the very economy you’re trying to harvest from.
There is a singular solution - cut spending. The Federal government is spending a third again as much as it takes in, which simply means that we need to cut a third of all federal spending. In a whole lot of cases, that means a huge number of programs just go away, along with departments and hundreds of thousands of federal employees.
And no one in Washington is even close to prepared to start talking real cuts. They won’t even cut their own gold plated benefits, massively ballooned office budgets, or any of the other perks they’ve given themselves over the years. If they can’t even take the public’s money seriously in managing their own compensation, how can we ever expect they’d respect the nation’s money in cutting the rest of the federal budget?
I take it back - there’s more than one real solution here, and alas, the one that will hurt quite a bit - devaluation of the US dollar. The overnight reduction of all wealth to simply maintain the beast that is trying to consume us.
Ben has promoted his “tax the rich more” idea for decades.
If you recall his show “Ben Stein’s Money” where he gave away much of his own wealth, you might conclude that he feels some guilt about his riches.
So, it’s not difficult to extrapolate that he believes others have an obligation to share.
Trouble is, he believes the government should be the agent of charity.
They are NOT!
They are a bunch of wasteful, self-serving, vote buying, socialists, who do very little good for anybody. Not to mention they usually make matters worse and encourage bad behavior.
STEIN is out of the closet.. he is a political transvestite..
He knows less federal spending is needed.. but wants more government..
You FORCE one person to “work” to fund the Government more than you FORCE another person to.
If you pay 33% of your income to the Government in Taxes, you are an Indentured Servant for four months out of the year. If you pay 10% of your Income to the Government in Taxes, you work only Six Weeks to fulfill your Tax obligation.
Sadly, 48% of the people pay nothing, therefore they are Free Men, with the rest of us paying for them through EITC and other Socialist Programs of course.
Remember the immortal words of Pharaoh Obama, it's all about “fairness”.
People who talk like old Ben are simply defeatists who can see past their own a**holes. He is obviously a socialist. We can cut spending without touching SS and medicare at the moment and without raising taxes. Getting rid of Bozo care will eliminate a huge amount of future debt. How about making Senators and Reps pay for their own medical insurance and making them pay into SS and eliminating their private retirement plans?
Just how much taxes does Ben think these rich people pay now and who does he think pays the bulk of the taxes that keep the country running now?
Oh well.
There goes my respect for Ben Stein.
Stein has lost touch with the man on the street. He's gone elitist.
He needs a shot of Clear Eyes right in his arse.
Leni
Ben whines about his spending when he has something like 3-4 homes, nice cars, etc.
He's become an elitist dick. He never discusses the spending in anything but generality's.
Since that is not what obama means by millionaires and “the wealthy”, he really needs to milk the middle class
But it would be fun to watch urkel and his corporate jet buddies and the DEMOCRAT congressmen (no GOP) who wrote special tax breaks for corporate jet depreciation into the stimulus bill) if the GOP gave him literally what he demagogues for
demensia?
Spoken like a true liberal. Conservative my @ss. He's obviously gone over to the dark side.
Is Ben writing a check—to lead by example?