It's a common leftist refrain these days:
LMAO lower taxes, you make over 400k? Didn't think so, law and order? When GOP Senators break the law on the daily and men hunt down people of color going for a simple jog? No thank you and oppose fraud? You're a damn joke if you didn't condemn Lady G. Look in the mirror
— Azure (@WPrivilage) November 19, 2020
As with most leftists who use leftist refrains, Azure hasn't put any thought actually into what he said.
Not the part about jogging niggers of course: men "hunted down" suspected criminals that the law hasn't been effectively dealing with. They may or may not have gotten it wrong. Sometimes police get it wrong. But then sometimes gangster-assed niggers open fire on the wrong house. Imperfect people don't always get their man.
The issue is the "LMAO lower taxes" stuff. Even if we took Azure's claim about only people earning over $400,000 annually affected by tax cuts seriously: so what? What's wrong with cutting the taxes of people who make over $400,000? Are they not human beings who earned their money the same as anybody else?
Leftists think they don't, of course. For them, people in mutually beneficial business relationships are stealing their money from somebody (who? they never really say), while governments imposing taxes aren't stealing anything from anybody even though there are massive lists of the citizens they are stealing that money from. (Of course, the "moral looting" crowd doesn't think actual violent theft is theft, but that's just how backwards left-wing thinking really is).
What Azure has done is identified a group of "evil" people he thinks it's okay that he and his gang of 50%+1 [with Biden stealing the election shouldn't that be "48%-1" now? -ed] can gang up on and steal from. That's sick, and it's important to attack this argument at its basic root: just because somebody is richer than you doesn't justify stealing from them. People making over $400,000 are human beings who deserve the fruits of their labours: at the very least if we insist on stealing 40% of their lives we should steal that from all lives equally #AllLivesMatter and all that jazz.
Azure didn't pick this number out of the air of course: that's the "high earners" that FakePresident Biden is proposing to increase taxes on to pay for his evil social programs. That link of course was before the election, when the #FakeNews media believed the pollster lies that the Democrats were on track to sweep the House and Senate: it concedes that if Biden doesn't control all three houses his tax plans will collapse quickly (I guess next time they need to take an extra few minutes on all the fraudulent mail-in ballots to fill in the down-ticket votes). This is, of course, another leftist refrain based on a lie: that if we just "taxed the rich" we could pay for everything they want government to force upon you.
I said earlier attacking this argument on its fundamental philosophical root was the most important, and it is: even if this plan worked, the rationale behind it is evil.
“In view of what they hear from the experts, the people cannot be blamed for their ignorance and their helpless confusion. If an average housewife struggles with her incomprehensibly shrinking budget and sees a tycoon in a resplendent limousine, she might well think that just one of his diamond cuff links would solve all her problems. She has no way of knowing that if all the personal luxuries of all the tycoons were expropriated, it would not feed her family — and millions of other, similar families — for one week; and that the entire country would starve on the first morning of the week to follow . . . . How would she know it, if all the voices she hears are telling her that we must soak the rich?
“No one tells her that higher taxes imposed on the rich (and the semi-rich) will not come out of their consumption expenditures, but out of their investment capital (i.e., their savings); that such taxes will mean less investment, i.e., less production, fewer jobs, higher prices for scarcer goods; and that by the time the rich have to lower their standard of living, hers will be gone, along with her savings and her husband’s job — and no power in the world (no economic power) will be able to revive the dead industries (there will be no such power left).”
- Ayn Rand, “The Inverted Moral Priorities,”
There's another aspect of this evil plan worth noting though: it won't work. Tax increases for one just don't raise the revenue leftists assume they will: they forget that people will make efforts to reduce their taxes. You'd think the party who's so popular with Hollywood celebrities would know about Hollywood Accounting, yet they have this massive blind spot in not understanding that other industries will use the same rationale as their studio bosses looking at royalty cheques. Secondly, as Ayn Rand has noted above and Mark Steyn confirmed with recent real-world data, you can confiscate all their wealth and it won't matter:
And that’s the problem. For what Obama’s spending, there aren’t enough of them, or us, or “the rich” – and there never will be. There is only one Warren Buffett. He is the third-wealthiest person on the planet. The first is a Mexican, and beyond the reach of the U.S. Treasury. Mr. Buffett is worth $44 billion. If he donated the entire lot to the Government of the United States, they would blow through it within four-and-a-half days. OK, so who’s the fourth-richest guy? He’s French. And the fifth guy’s a Spaniard. No. 6 six is Larry Ellison. He’s American, but that loser is only worth $36 billion. So he and Buffett between them could keep the United States Government going for a week. The next-richest American is Christy Walton of Wal-Mart, and she’s barely a semi-Buffett. So her $25 billion will see you through a couple of days of the second week. There aren’t a lot of other semi-Buffetts, but, if you scrounge around, you can rustle up some hemi-demi-semi-Buffetts: If you confiscate the total wealth of the Forbes 400 richest Americans it comes to $1.5 trillion, which is just a little less than the Obama budget deficit for year.
The United States current national debt is $27.248 trillion dollars. Before the Wuhan Flu hit the United States had 155.76 million people working, and yes that includes CEOs. In other words to pay off that national debt each worker would need to average $174,000 in payouts. The mean U.S. salary is $33,706, meaning each worker would need to have their salary fully confiscated for over five years: that means not eating, not paying rent, not going anywhere, anything.
Leftists like Azure will think that "the rich" just pay because their lot isn't very good at math. CEO salaries are included in the mean salary but it still doesn't make a difference in aggregate. Looking at it on a macroeconomics level, in 2018 the U.S. GDP was $20.54 trillion. That means if every U.S. citizen's financial output was totally confiscated (which includes nonpersonal wealth in everything from corporate profit to stock earnings) it still would take one year, 3 months, and 27 days to make up the debt. Of course soon after that every U.S. company would be instantly bought up by their international competition taking advantage of their cashflow situation, meaning no more nonpersonal wealth effectively being generated in the USA and therefore no way to do this a second time and pay for the Joe Biden social programs that presumably are still running. Nor the unfunded liabilities for existing programs: that's $137 trillion. So what does the U.S. economy look like when their GDP is confiscated entirely (remember that means no American can pay for food!) for 6 years 8 months and 2 days?
Azure and his ilk don't think about the reality of their evil desires. They don't even realize they're evil. And that's why their dangerous.
That, and the jogging.
