It's not even an equal transfer. In order for the government to waste $1 billion in transfer of wealth to job programs, it needs to take well in excess of $1 billion because a good part of it will be used up in bureaucracy before it makes it to the jobs program. So you need to take $1.5-$1.75 billion to net $1 billion because a half to three quarters will get swallowed in bureaucracy.
I think we should get rid of the word tax and replace it with the words wealth spreading.
“I think we should get rid of the word tax and replace it with the words wealth spreading.”
The problem is that many tens of millions of Americans don’t find the notion of “wealth spreading” offensive. We are paradoxically a land of opportunity, but also great envy. The lopsided structure of our income tax system is living proof of this. Many people are perfectly comfortable with loading an ever-rising share of the tax load on the people at the top on grounds “they can afford it”, on the presumption that it’s “unfair” to earn tens of millions a year when people at the bottom are working much harder in a physical sense or on the presumption that such vast amounts of wealth cannot have been earned honestly, but instead must have resulted from sticking it to the little man.
Ironically, Obama—who above all seeks to model himself as this generation’s JFK—seems to have forgotten it was JFK who said “Ask NOT what you’re country can do for you, but what YOU can do for your country.” While JFK in reality had many flaws both as president and person, in statements such as these, he at least can be credited with appealing to the better angels of human nature. Moreover, in tax policy, JFK’s signature achievement was in dramatically cutting tax rates at the TOP [in that regard, he was the first “supply side” president who understood that growing the economy wouldn’t and couldn’t be achieved by just “spreading the wealth”].
In contrast, by promising giveaways right and left—all to be bankrolled by those at the top (i.e., the ultimate free lunch)—Obama has fostered and exploited class envy in a manner JFK would have found abhorrent and reprehensible.
In the words of Walter Williams: “Three-fifths to two-thirds of the federal budget consists of taking property from one American and giving it to another. If a private person did the same thing, we would call it theft. When government does it, we euphemistically call it income redistribution, but that’s exactly what thieves do — redistribute income.” http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2006/feb/14/20060214-102145-9583r/
So I myself prefer the elegance and simplicity of Frank Chodorov: Taxation is robbery. http://mises.org/etexts/taxrob.asp