http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2008/10/memo_to_obama_you_will_not_out.html
A Letter to Senator Obama
By Tony Batman
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You said in your response to Joe the plumber’s well publicized inquiry about how your tax policies would affect him, “I don’t want to punish you with higher taxes. I just want to spread the wealth around.” This says everything anyone needs to know about you.
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I am a CPA and do not have to think very hard to see your personal income tax plan is a prime example of your duplicitous pandering.
The effective total tax rate on my income in 2007 was an incredibly high 31%. This includes federal income tax, payroll tax, and Medicare tax. My earnings are almost entirely from productive work with only negligible amounts from passive income from savings and investments.
You read that correctly. About one-third of the income I earn from my hard productive work is confiscated by the federal government. I gather from your rhetoric you still don’t think 31% of my income is enough to take from me.
This entrenched progressive confiscation of the fruits of my increasingly productive activities is wrong. I do not consume any more of the nation’s infrastructure, nor any more of its defense capabilities, nor any more of its judicial system than the masses of Americans who pay no taxes whatsoever.
I have calculated that through your proposal my total tax bill will soon be an astonishing 42% of my productive work. You plan to tax the entirety of my productive earnings for Social Security even though I wish never to be part of Social Security. You want to redistribute my tax proceeds to less productive non-taxpayers.
Where is the fairness in this?
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I’ll suspend my emotional angle for a moment and speak to policy. Your proposed middle income tax cuts are larger than your proposed increases for families earning over $250,000. That math does not work. A 10% tax cut, not a tax increase, on incomes of over $250,000 frees up far more capital than a tax cut on income of $50,000. Your logic has it all backwards.
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Americans should not be fooled when you say you will help the poor and middle class by taxing the rich. It is pandering. If you actually believe your policies, then you are committed to reducing the earnings of those not yet rich.
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It is deceptive for you to say that small businesses will enjoy lower taxes under your plan. The reality is that because of the structure of sole proprietorships, s corporations, and partnerships, a significant number of small businesses pay individual rates of taxation on profits. So the reality is that an increase in top rates like you propose will actually harm a significant number of the small businesses you say you wish to wish to help. Astonishing!
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I have experienced the wrath of big government impacting our own business. Since Enron, the financial services industry has become so overregulated that the onerous administrative and regulatory costs have caused us and most of our competitors to change the way we do business. Forced to raise prices to cover regulatory compliance costs, we have severely curtailed our services to average Americans, the middle class, the very families who now desperately need us and our 600 affiliated professional businesses. Instead of helping the mainstream of America, we now restrict our professional services to the more affluent tier of Americans. What a shame.
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You are seemingly intent on making the federal government the source of everybody’s happiness. For us, your scheme will not work. It can only cause our unhappiness.
In summary, you and the Democrats wish to destroy the very same system which enabled me to not be a burden to the nation and to take care of those Americans who legitimately suffer and need help.
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Senator Obama, your policies are an affront to capitalism and you demonize it with your subtle cynicism and your condescension.
Where capitalism appears to have failed is because of government intervention. This fact is not even debatable. Government intervention has created such deviant versions of capitalistic democracy that those variants should not even be called true capitalism.
Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez has declared class war on capitalism and democracy in Latin America. Much of the Latin American form of capitalism should be called “capitalistic cronyism,” where true open and vicious head-to-head commercial competition was never allowed to take root and the best entrepreneurial minds were hamstrung by aristocratic legacies and corrupted governments.
Do not compare America’s capitalism to its failed imitators. Your plans for more federal government intervention and control of our economy will most assuredly lead to the same fate as the club of failed imitators.
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Senator Obama, your promises of horrifying tax increases on me and on the company I run and your threats of even more burdensome regulation are, in your own words, “game changers.”
Higher corporate income taxes and payroll taxes rob and neuter all businesses great and small of their ability to make and keep essential promises to the people who depend on them. This is a shame and a consequence of idiotic and pander motivated ideas.
Under your taxation plan, I may one day be in a position to no longer make any meaningful promises to our fantastic employees.
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I believe our nation can achieve greatness beyond our imagination only if salvation by federal government is erased completely from our consciousness. It is a toxic addiction - the heroin from which we must commence immediate withdrawal.
The federal government is dysfunctional beyond repair. Dysfunctional organizations are chaotic and grossly inefficient and you, amazingly, intend to make it bigger. Why?
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The axiom, “Free people can never be equal, equal people can never be free,” lives forever.
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