That fact?: Income is not wealth.
Everyone who earns in one year more than whatever arbitrary demarcation line divides the "rich" from the proles is assumed to be wealthy. (What is that number this week? Last I heard it was inching up to $1 million a year.) This assumption leads to the next step of wanting to categorically tax these individuals' incomes as if they themselves are rich.
Yes, many "rich" people have high incomes, and many high income earners are "rich." But many is never all. High income earners and "the rich" is no exception.
The wealthiest safe-made people in America were not "rich" the first year they brought home $x or more. Many people earning high incomes this year are not yet "rich" or are on their way down from being "rich" onto their way to being in the middle class. We just do not live in an economic caste system, all the bellicose class warfare bilge notwithstanding.
As Thomas Sowell points out in Intellectuals and Society
, the Treasury Department (that bastion of people interested in abolishing the progressive income tax system) reported that among the highest income earners of 1996--the top 1/100 of 1%--a mere 25% remained "rich" by 2005.This underlying assumption of this assumption holds that everyone getting hit with higher taxes has sooooo much loot lying around they can use their riches to buy, invest, and promote economic growth. So tax, tax, tax away. Wrong. Tax high income earners who are not "rich" and you're confiscating out of their hands and the economy that much more possibility for real capital investment and growth.
Again, we're leaving aside the debate over the propriety of progressively taxing some people more than others. The above assumption is simply incorrect. Moving along tax policy based on this assumption is simply not justifiable. Using demagogue verbiage like "...the richest Americans" to push such tax policy is either a poorly thought out effort or just thinly veiled partisan chicanery.
The assumption articulated in the caption below is better grounded and more thought out than this high-income-equals-being-rich assumption. And both are hilarious.
