Late Monday the Seattle City Council voted unanimously in favor of a personal income tax on its top earning residents. Individuals with incomes in excess of $250,000 and those filing jointly with incomes in excess of $500,000 would be subject to a 2.25% tariff. People with incomes below those thresholds would not be affected.
Why are they doing this? Because Seattle’s leftist mayor considers current tax rates “unsustainable”. Since when did tax rates become “unsustainable” – because they’re too low!?
It’s not “low” taxes that are unsustainable. It’s unlimited and unjustified government spending that’s unsustainable. Politicians like Seattle’s mayor take from the productive and give to the non-productive–most of them political cronies–and then expect civilization to keep on being productive.
It’s truly insane. Government seizes the wealth of others in the name of moral righteousness, keeps much of the wealth for itself and then seizes more and more and more. Government officials assume they have the right to spend other people’s money, which they don’t, and that they spend this money more effectively and rationally than those to whom the money belongs – which they can’t.
By every economic and moral standard, taxation – beyond the bare minimum required to give us courts and a police force/military – is just plain wrong. Yet we’ve reached a point where not only does nobody question this fact, but in places like Seattle, government officials moan and whine that their inability to spend, tax, steal and redistribute as much as they feel like is “unsustainable”.
What people like this mayor really mean is that freedom and liberty are unsustainable. It’s not enough to steal from the most productive in direct proportion to how productive they are. At the federal level, we now steal from future generations of productive people — $20 trillion and counting – who have not yet had a chance to be born, much less lead productive lives so government can then seize 30, 50 or even 80 percent of their earnings.
The madness of it all is what’s unsustainable. Places like Seattle are, politically and morally, at the bottom of the heap. Eventually, they will be at the bottom economically, as well. People will flee to places where politicians do not consider freedom and liberty as unsustainable things. And if there eventually comes a time where there is no place to flee, then all productivity will simply stop.
What will the confiscators do then?
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