The U.S. Senate’s leading proponent of tax increases on the American people — Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) was delinquent on his property taxes on until a reporter called him to ask him about it.

Brown who supports higher income, energy and investment taxes did not pay his property tax on a luxury condo in Washington, DC.  He was late on his payment since last September.  Curiously, Brown paid his “fair share” after a reporter called his office to inquire about why he was late.

Brown, who is battling Ohio State Treasurer and veteran Josh Mandel, is one of the Senate’s leading spokesmen for big labor and big government.  Brown consistently demands that Americans pay “fair share” in taxes proposing a new surtax on adjusted gross income.

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As usual, the left is wondering whether corporations pay their “fair share.”  This time, it seems they may have a point.  As Time magazine reported yesterday, a recent Wall Street Journal study of Congressional Budget Office statistics showed that American corporations paid an effective tax rate of 12.1% last year.  That’s the lowest number in four decades, despite a nominal tax rate that runs 35%, second only to Japan’s 39.5%; if you include state corporate taxes, America is now number one in the world.

So why the low effective tax rate?  According to both the Journal and Time, it’s due to a corporate tax break set into the stimulus package, which allowed corporations to use an accounting trick: they could take write-offs on capital investments all at once rather than over time.  Typically, you take a tax write-off as the value of a good depreciates – if you buy a computer, it loses value over time, and you write that in your tax returns.  Under the stimulus package, you were allowed to basically write off the whole purchase.  The result was huge write-offs for corporations.

Now, normally, this wouldn’t be a bad thing.

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We’re hearing an awful lot about the “wealthy” paying “their fair share” where taxes are concerned. Pres. Obama and his Progressive and liberal Democrat brethren have perfectly coordinated their talking points to affect a campaign of undefined and reckless class warfare against the productive class, doing so for the sole purpose of political gain. Expectedly, Mr. Obama presents a Janus face: denying out of one mouth that he is utilizing class warfare; demonizing the producers out of the other.

In announcing his new, but all too familiar, deficit reduction plan on September 19th, Mr. Obama said:

“This is not class warfare, it is math…All I’m saying is that those who have done well, including me, should pay their fair share in taxes…We can’t just cut our way out of this hole… It is only right we ask everyone to pay their fair share…We can’t afford these special lower rates for the wealthy. We can’t afford them when we are running these big deficits… Middle class taxpayers shouldn’t pay higher taxes than millionaires and billionaires. That’s pretty straightforward. It’s hard to argue against that…”

Of course, an honest man would admit that the federal government is spending way, way, way beyond its means. An honest man would admit that the federal government has gone far, far, far beyond its constitutional mandate in providing special interest programs that would be better suited for private sector benevolence organizations. An honest man would acknowledge the fact – the fact – that the federal government, now hijacked by the political correctness of Progressivism, has ventured into social engineering via its “social justice” campaign and departed, to a great degree, from the vision of federal government established by our Founders and Framers.

But, that would be an honest man and honest men. We, here today, are dealing with opportunistic politicians, whose primary goals are to retain power (and by any means possible) and to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.”

Which brings me back the points I want to address: What is anyone’s “fair share” of taxes when our tax code is not only a progressive tax code (oh, the irony), but rife with special interest exemptions, limitations and write-offs? Who decides what constitutes someone’s “fair share”? And for that matter, who defines who is “wealthy” or “middle class” or “working class” or “poor”?

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Barack Obama’s latest rhetorical and policy prescription assaults on Americans who make money are his alleged “jobs” and “deficit reduction” plans.

In which the President calls for nearly half a trillion dollars in new taxes – under the oh-so-tired guise of making the “rich” “pay their fair share.”

(Someone needs to introduce these people to Reality.  Here in Reality, life isn’t fair.  The sooner they realize this – and stop trying to use government to make it so – the better off we all will be.)

The American people are overwhelmingly underwhelmed by the President’s latest bit of Leftism.  (Not to mention many Congressional Democrats.) I wonder why?

Perhaps it’s the fact that the federal government has increased its per annum spending by 29% in just the last four years – from $2.73 trillion to $3.82 trillion.

During the depths of the Great Recession – when the private sector was least equipped to shoulder the gigantic new burden.

And that a return to 2007 spending levels would negate most of our deficit problem, and begin to work dramatically on our debt problem – without raising taxes a cent.

Perhaps it’s the fact that the federal government wastes gobs and gobs and gobs of money.

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A Parable If You Will…

A friend of mine has a sister who has been broke for years.   Ten years ago he could no longer watch her struggle while his own career took off and he began supporting her by supplementing her small income with his own money.  He makes $300,000 a year and gives her $30,000 a year to help her out…roughly 20% of his take-home after all of his taxes (federal, state, local) are taken out of his paycheck.

Now, in those ten years of supporting her, she has not used that money as a foundation to build herself a better more independent life contructed on sound financial footing.  If anything, her situation now is even worse than it was a decade ago because she continues to make bad  decisions again and again.  She married an alcoholic husband (despite warnings from her family this was the case) and she then had a child with that same husband who is now of course estranged, voluntarily putting exponentially more strain on her already stressful life.  As of now, despite my friend having willingly given her all in $300,000 over ten years – money he could have put towards his kid’s college education, paying off his mortgage, or just socked away in the bank for a rainy day – she is no better off because the way she is running her affairs is still a disaster.  She hasn’t learned a thing.

Still, he continues to pay her because he believes it is his moral obligation to give back to those in need, especially as he has done so well in life.  He’s not thrilled about it, but he gets the concept and bucks up.  Plus he genuinely cares for the down-trodden, realizing that a few bad decisions in his own life, a wrong fork in the road taken, and he could have been there with her…still could be even.  He made need help himself someday.  Who knows what the future holds?

Now, the other day she came to him for her annual $30,000.  But this time, because of  new credit card debts accumulated, she asked him for $35,000.  Her logic?  He can afford it and she needs it.
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Those listening to President Obama’s speech in the Rose Garden yesterday may have been hoping for remarks outlining a comprehensive debt reducing package from the nation’s chief executive, but what they got was yet another class warfare screed.  Replete with admonitions that the wealthy need to pay their “fair share” (as defined by Him of course) and sprinkled with his patented scare tactics rooted in the fallacy of the false alternative (either hedge fund managers pay more or seniors will go hungry) the president to me revealed more of himself even than he has in the past about what really makes him tick, both philosophically as psychologically.

He is, at heart, an ardent believer that the wealth of a nation’s citizenry is in the end the property of their government into which the haves pay and bureaucrats then distribute out as social justice in the form or largess to the have-nots.  His increasing vibe of anger, that seems to conversely rise as his poll numbers fall, reveals to me a rather petulant man, unable to grasp the notion that he may not actually be the smartest guy in the room (despite the assurances of his orbiting satellites of sycophants in and out of  the MSM media) and that there are those who disagree with him not because they haven’t heard his message, but rather because they have and have found it wanting.

I found myself listening to his speech and thinking that I’d heard most of it before.  Most but not all.  One new tact that the historian in me found fascinating, and quite cynical, was his reaching down into the soil of Mount Vernon to summon the ghost of our most esteemed first president, George Washington, to help make his case.  Mr. Obama offered up this snippet from Washington’s September 19, 1796 Farwell Address to the nation to bolster his tax raising stance:

“…towards the payment of debts there must be revenue; that to have revenue there must be taxes; and no taxes can be devised which are not more or less inconvenient and unpleasant.”

Here is how Mr. Obama’s speech-writers interpreted our first president’s advice,   Said our current president:

“It’s always more popular to promise the moon and leave the bill for after the next election or the election after that.  That’s been true since our founding.  George Washington grappled with this problem.  He understood that dealing with the debt is — these are his words – ‘always a choice of difficulties.’  But he also knew that public servants weren’t elected to do what was easy; they weren’t elected to do what was politically advantageous.”

I wonder if anyone in the Obama administration studied history because to reach back to Washington to support, in effect, raising already burdensome income taxes to sustain a massive federal bureaucracy and social welfare state is about as far a reach as one can stretch before toppling over into the abyss of utter nonsense.

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Hillary Clinton touched off an age old discussion this week about whether the rich are paying their “fair share.”  It is, of course, one the Left’s most used demagogic cries and one of its biggest proponents is former Labor Secretary now University Professor Robert Reich.  He was on Larry Kudlow’s show recently demonstrating, in glaring fashion, the Left’s the case for big government and higher tax rates.  It was a case study on why the American economy is slumping today.

What is Fair?

Hillary, Nancy, Harry, Obama and many others on the Left use the fair share argument, which is nothing more than a class-warfare tactic, as a prelude to raising tax rates to pay for social welfare programs. Stephen Moore, who was also the show and has been fighting this fight for years, and ably so, pointed out that the top 2 ½% of income tax payers pay the same amount in income taxes as the bottom 97 ½%.  It is also fact that the bottom 50% of income earners pay almost no income tax at all. If that is unfair in the minds of the Left, then clearly they want a chosen few to pay for everything and believe FDR when he said: “increasing the tax paid by individuals in the higher brackets . . . was the American thing to do and increasing still further the taxes paid by individuals in the highest brackets was even more the American thing to do.”

Of course, the problem with such policies is that wealth moves in the form of businesses and their owners moving away, along with sensible people realizing that it is not worth their time to risk everything only to have the state confiscate their rewards, and for still others to simply engage in tax evasion such as under reporting income and bartering.

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