In answer to my sub-title above, the magic 8 ball says 'Not likely.'
In anycase, today's issue of The Washington
Times has an excellent piece in the 'Inside Politics' column.
Note that the link for the item snipped below may be time/date sensitive so I'm
including a fair amount here so you get the point of the piece. Please try to
check out the entire column though so you can catch the original information in
complete context.
Inside Politics column - August 6,
2007:
|
Luxury-tax ghost
"Back in the hot summer of 1990, Senate Majority Leader George
Mitchell proudly engineered the infamous 'luxury tax,' a nasty little tithe
on everything from furs to jewelry to yachts," Wall Street Journal columnist
Kimberley A. Strassel writes.
"Democrats were proud: Not only were they throwing new dollars at the
Treasury, they'd done it by socking it to the rich. The wealthy, in the words of
then-House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt, would finally pay 'their fair
share.'
"Within a year, Mr. Mitchell was back in the Senate passionately demanding an
end to the same dreaded luxury tax. The levy had devastated his home state of
Maine's boat-building business, throwing yard workers, managers and salesmen out
of jobs. The luxury tax was repealed by 1993, though by the look of today's tax
debate, its lessons haven't been forgotten. Top Democrats are working to
implement a new class-warfare tax strategy, only this time they're getting
pushback from those in their party who fear the economic consequences.
"Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, for their part, are steaming
ahead with a plan ripped straight out of Mr. Mitchell's 1990 playbook. They're
sitting atop years of pent-up spending demand that is now starting to bust free.
Their liberal members want to give more money to gentleman farmers, take credit
for expanding health insurance for 'the children,' and write checks to all those
struggling renewable energy titans, like Archer Daniels
Midland." |
Yup, I would say that the Democrats seem destined not to learn from their
failures of the past, no matter how long ago, or even how recently they may have
seen examples that prove their methods wrong.
Consider, if you will, that the Bush tax cuts -- those same tax-cuts that a
certain Clueless individual here at JoeUser.com would have you believe ruined
the economy and the future for all U.S. citizens -- wound up feeding much
revenue into the federal coffers once they were enacted. Time and again it
has been shown -- even by a President with the last name Kennedy
-- that cutting taxes returns more revenue than is ever assumed to be lost via
those cuts, and yet time and again the Democrats line up looking for new ways to
raise taxes and implement class war-fare so that their minions will line up
behind them with the pitchforks ready to take away from the rich and give back
to, well, nobody.
Huh? Give back to nobody did I say? Uh, yes. Yes, I
did. Give back to nobody because the revenues just aren't there to
get. Well, perhaps they are, but they wind up not really being there
because as soon as there is even a whiff of a tax increase on luxury items,
and/or on the wealthy, they change their habits and suck their money out of the
economy to sit on waiting for long-term gains and the eventual tax-cuts they
know will come from future administrations and congresses that are smart enough
and/or desperate enough to loosen the reigns on the money and let it all start
flowing back out into the economy.
As the clipping above notes, during the last round of luxury taxes, the taxes
that were levied wound up collecting almost nothing for the government because
people simply changed their buying habits. They delayed purchases, or
bought used items that helped them avoid paying the luxury tax at all. And
the government sat back waiting for revenue to come in that just didn't.
In the end, those luxury taxes may have done more to raise the deficit than even
a tiny fraction of the Bush tax-cuts ever could hope to (consider the compounded
interest on the money that was never collected, and yet still spent when we were
deficit spending back in 1993. Add inflation on top of that and you
realize that the lost revenue that we could have had if the tax rates had been
left alone, or better yet, if we had cut capital gains taxes and let more money
flow into the economy, is not an insignificant amount).
There are still no shortage of liberals ready to line-up in absolute support
of raising taxes on the wealthy though. It's like the town mob that
congegrates around the fire about to go off and burn the witches at the
stake. Soak the rich, soak the rich, soak the rich! Yup, they follow
like the mob and go off looking for the rich targets to get the money
from. Unfortunately they fail to realize that as they carry their torches
and light the fires, they just burned up the money with the victim and will
likely have neither around when all is said and done.
