Tennesseefree.com

To expound on this post, which Tgirsch laughingly attempted to take apart, and obviously misunderstood, read this from the Wall Street Journal.

The data show that the 2003 Bush tax cuts caused what may be the biggest increase in tax payments by the rich in American history.

The nearby chart shows that the top 1% of taxpayers, those who earn above $388,806, paid 40% of all income taxes in 2006, the highest share in at least 40 years. The top 10% in income, those earning more than $108,904, paid 71%. Barack Obama says he’s going to cut taxes for those at the bottom, but that’s also going to be a challenge because Americans with an income below the median paid a record low 2.9% of all income taxes, while the top 50% paid 97.1%. Perhaps he thinks half the country should pay all the taxes to support the other half.

Aha, we are told: The rich paid more taxes because they made a greater share of the money. That is true. The top 1% earned 22% of all reported income. But they also paid a share of taxes not far from double their share of income. In other words, the tax code is already steeply progressive.

Right out of the gate, the preceding article violates basic modern liberalism, by using a term like “the data”. But that’s a discussion for another day. You see, even though rich people are paying more, they had to make more in order to to pay in that extra money, and the liberals just can’t have that. As I have pointed out repeatedly, liberals would rather take in less revenue, revenue to be spent on “the poor”, in order to make sure that “the rich” makes less money. Equality, fairness, and justice is what liberals say they want, and that is true. But they don’t want to necessarily bring the lower classes up. They would just as soon settle for bringing the higher classes down. Equality of misery is still equality, as far as the left is concerned.

Please read the whole article. There is much more good stuff in there. Here is the ending.

If Mr. Obama does succeed in raising tax rates on the rich, we’d also wager that the rich share of tax payments would fall. The last time tax rates were as high as the Senator wants them — the Carter years — the rich paid only 19% of all income taxes, half of the 40% share they pay today. Why? Because they either worked less, earned less, or they found ways to shelter income from taxes so it was never reported to the IRS as income.

The way to soak the rich is with low tax rates, and last week’s IRS data provide more powerful validation of that proposition.

Like I said before though, they’ll take those lower tax receipts, in order to satisfy the wealth envy of their constituency. Sick, is it not?