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"They bring up some good points," he says.

"That you're going to use on whom?..."

A co-worker was going on a few months ago about how the rich don't "pay their fair share". I went to Rush's website and found a link to the IRS website that has a breakdown of just how much everyone pays. I showed my co-worker that, for starters, his government considers him to be "rich" and that he and a lot of people like him pay the majority of taxes.

He was stunned. At first he questioned the validity of the data, but I pointed out that it was compiled by the IRS.

About a month later I overheard him ranting about how he and everyone like him pay all the taxes. It's Reaganomics (trickle-down theory) and it works.

That data also proves the top 1-5% of wage earners pay the bulk of all income taxes.

And, as rates have gone down, their percentage of that bulk goes up. When those rates were raised by Clinton, their share went down. Why?

It's all about taxable income. The biggest change wasn't lowering the rates but the elimination of all the deductions and loopholes. When the top rate was close to 78%, those deductions were so liberal it was almost like deducting the air you breath.

Sales taxes paid, income taxes paid, ALL interest paid no matter what (there's a stupid policy - incentives to increase debt just to write off the interest on income taxes), etc. In the mid-1970's it was very common for the very wealthy to pay NO income taxes. Why? Because they didn't realize income. They were allowed all kinds of tax shelters and losses they could write off.

One example, since I'm in the business, is hotels. Real Estate companies like mad would build fancy hotels just to lose money and lower their taxable income overall. This was rampant in the 60's and 70's. The S&L "crisis" only happened when Congress, and unfortunately Reagan, changed that drastically in 1986 instead of phasing it in. Thus real estate taxable income was pushed up, even at lower rates, to the point of devaluing property. But the majority was only the property that was overvalued anyway so speculators were the biggest ones hurt. But, unfortunately again, they tended to be big contributors and got Congress to bail them out (John McCain was one of those helping them).

But the overall changes were for the better. Lower rates in exchange for a simpler code. Thus, the taxable base grew since more and more people would rather EARN more at lower rates than hide and shift the money into money losing prospects. It made the economy leaner and meaner and profit oriented and thus more efficient.

Another problem with high tax rates and easy deduction and loopholes is that the average person can't take advantage and thus the rich are even more benefited. Remember, the rich don't require income. They have wealth. Thus they can easily turn their income to zero or, in those years, even negative income and spread those losses out for seven years into the future.

By making it more attractive to earn income that was taxed at a lower rate, it opened up incentives to invest, grow, build, etc.

The same thing happened when the GOP took Congress in 1995. The surpluses only came about because they cut the rates on capital gains and those increases (more people willing to sell capital and realize a gain to be taxed at a lower rate) is what filled the coffers...not the higher income tax rates passed by the Democrats. They show the actual percentage of income taxes to the government were going down by the "rich".

But liberals, Democrats, and even a lot of so-called "conservatives" don't understand that. The idiots on the left look to the past and say, "and if we taxed that income at 39.6% instead of 35%, we'd have more money". Of course, more money to just spend away on government programs that don't work. But, they won't have that money. Why? Because with that higher rate the taxable income base will shrink. So they are living in a utopia that doesn't exist.

It's like Wal-Mart saying, "wow, we could have made billions more if we hadn't cut the price of that toaster from $15 to $12". But they wouldn't have sold that many toasters at $15 as they did at $12.

Look at California and what happened to them. They raised the top rates on "the rich" so high, they left. Thus the taxable income base shrunk and the ones left paying were also the ones demanding and using more government services. Thus, income is down, costs are up and exactly what you expect would happened - happened! Bankruptcy.

It's so simple you wonder why people don't "get it".