Patriot Heart
05-08-2006, 08:07 AM
By Thomas E. Brewton (http://www.theconservativevoice.com/category/231.html)
<!-- start.title -->Groveling Worship of Ignorance
<!-- end.title --><!-- publish.date -->May 06, 2006 08:22 PM EST
Liberals blindly worship their "scientific" doctrines concocted out of thin air by the high priests of socialism 200 years ago. Living in a utopian world, they simply ignore real-life experience.
Latest data from the IRS and other economic and statistical arms of the Federal government paint a picture that is the opposite of liberals' theoretical expectations.
President John F. Kennedy's most effective single policy initiative was his round of massive income-tax cuts in the early 1960s. Criticized by social-justice liberals for not raising taxes and doling out more welfare-state benefits, Kennedy famously retorted that a rising tide lifts all boats; everyone benefits when the level of economic activity rises and more jobs become available.
Kennedy's tax cuts started a huge and long-lived uptrend in the nation's economy. Twenty years later, tax cuts by President Ronald Reagan did the same thing, just as have the tax cuts initiated by the George W. Bush administration.
Wall Street Journal editorial board member Stephen Moore writes in his May 4, 2006, op-ed article that the Bush "tax cuts for the rich" not only have put the economy into high gear, but they have counter intuitively increased the tax burden on the wealthy and decreased the burden on the lowest income percentiles.
"Between 2002 and 2004, tax payments by those with adjusted gross incomes (AGI) of more than $200,000 a year, which is roughly 3% of taxpayers, increased by 19.4% -- more than double the 9.3% increase for all other taxpayers.
Between 2001 and 2004 (the most recent data), the percentage of federal income taxes paid by those with $200,000 incomes and above has risen to 46.6% from 40.5%. In other words, out of every 100 Americans, the wealthiest three are now paying close to the same amount in taxes as the other 97 combined."
SNIP
Liberals ability to ignore repeated factual confutation and continue in their fatuity is, to borrow H. L. Mencken's comment about Puritanism, a form of neurosis. It borders on the heretical religiosity that led followers of cults like Jim Jones's Peoples Temple to commit mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978.
The most fundamental dogma in the catechism of the socialist religion is the blind faith that human nature and human society can be perfected by the simple, materialistic mechanism of redistributing income as equally as possible. If everybody has an equal income, so the theory goes, all envy, greed, and aggression will vanish. We will then be able to enter the earthly paradise of Marxian Leninism in which the apparatus of government will slowly wither away, and all peoples will live in perfect harmony with plentiful supplies of all truly needed food, clothing, housing, medical care, education and jobs (assigned, of course, by the state planners).
SNIP
France, the "rationalistic" home of socialism, has run through many more than a dozen different constitutions, at least five republics, restorations of monarchy, and several imperial interludes. Today France is the sick man of Europe, its government brought to its knees by unemployable students at the Sorbonne rioting in the streets. The nation that was the most powerful force on the Continent in the Christian era of its history is now being slowly strangled by its social-justice commitments to welfare-state benefits entitlements that its economy increasingly cannot support.
http://www.theconservativevoice.com/articles/article.html?id=14403
<!-- start.title -->Groveling Worship of Ignorance
<!-- end.title --><!-- publish.date -->May 06, 2006 08:22 PM EST
Liberals blindly worship their "scientific" doctrines concocted out of thin air by the high priests of socialism 200 years ago. Living in a utopian world, they simply ignore real-life experience.
Latest data from the IRS and other economic and statistical arms of the Federal government paint a picture that is the opposite of liberals' theoretical expectations.
President John F. Kennedy's most effective single policy initiative was his round of massive income-tax cuts in the early 1960s. Criticized by social-justice liberals for not raising taxes and doling out more welfare-state benefits, Kennedy famously retorted that a rising tide lifts all boats; everyone benefits when the level of economic activity rises and more jobs become available.
Kennedy's tax cuts started a huge and long-lived uptrend in the nation's economy. Twenty years later, tax cuts by President Ronald Reagan did the same thing, just as have the tax cuts initiated by the George W. Bush administration.
Wall Street Journal editorial board member Stephen Moore writes in his May 4, 2006, op-ed article that the Bush "tax cuts for the rich" not only have put the economy into high gear, but they have counter intuitively increased the tax burden on the wealthy and decreased the burden on the lowest income percentiles.
"Between 2002 and 2004, tax payments by those with adjusted gross incomes (AGI) of more than $200,000 a year, which is roughly 3% of taxpayers, increased by 19.4% -- more than double the 9.3% increase for all other taxpayers.
Between 2001 and 2004 (the most recent data), the percentage of federal income taxes paid by those with $200,000 incomes and above has risen to 46.6% from 40.5%. In other words, out of every 100 Americans, the wealthiest three are now paying close to the same amount in taxes as the other 97 combined."
SNIP
Liberals ability to ignore repeated factual confutation and continue in their fatuity is, to borrow H. L. Mencken's comment about Puritanism, a form of neurosis. It borders on the heretical religiosity that led followers of cults like Jim Jones's Peoples Temple to commit mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978.
The most fundamental dogma in the catechism of the socialist religion is the blind faith that human nature and human society can be perfected by the simple, materialistic mechanism of redistributing income as equally as possible. If everybody has an equal income, so the theory goes, all envy, greed, and aggression will vanish. We will then be able to enter the earthly paradise of Marxian Leninism in which the apparatus of government will slowly wither away, and all peoples will live in perfect harmony with plentiful supplies of all truly needed food, clothing, housing, medical care, education and jobs (assigned, of course, by the state planners).
SNIP
France, the "rationalistic" home of socialism, has run through many more than a dozen different constitutions, at least five republics, restorations of monarchy, and several imperial interludes. Today France is the sick man of Europe, its government brought to its knees by unemployable students at the Sorbonne rioting in the streets. The nation that was the most powerful force on the Continent in the Christian era of its history is now being slowly strangled by its social-justice commitments to welfare-state benefits entitlements that its economy increasingly cannot support.
http://www.theconservativevoice.com/articles/article.html?id=14403