Study: Dem Tax Policy Driven by Hatred for Rich

Envy and retribution are poor foundations for crafting public policy 

“Hatred is like drinking poison and then waiting for it to kill your enemy.” —quote attributed to South African anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela

Last month, the Cato Institute released its 2019 Welfare, Work, and Wealth National Survey, and it offers a fascinating insight into the motives of those demanding ever higher taxes on the productive class in America.

The study surveyed 1,700 Americans to determine why some support socialism, tax increases on the wealthy, and wealth redistribution; is it compassion or resentment?

To determine compassion, they were asked if they agreed or disagreed with statements like “I suffer from others’ sorrows,” or “I feel sympathy for those who are worse off than myself.” To measure resentment toward successful people, they were asked if they agreed/disagreed with statements like “Very successful people sometimes need to be brought down a peg or two even if they’ve done nothing wrong,” or “It’s good to see very successful people fail occasionally.”

The study found resentment toward successful people is a far stronger motivator than compassion for the poor when it comes to support for raising taxes on high earners.

This philosophy of hatred for high achievers is rampant within the modern Democrat Party, evidenced by how the frontrunners for the 2020 presidential nomination are eagerly promising to punish the wealthy.

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren has called for an additional 2% tax on the wealth of all households with incomes over $50 million. To be clear, this is not a tax on new income, but on all wealth accumulated over a lifetime — investments, savings, assets, inheritance, etc., which has already been subject to income taxes, payroll taxes, capital gains taxes, property taxes, etc.

The 16th Amendment was ratified on the promise that it would only punish the ultra-rich, but today it impacts every American. Warren promises her new tax will only hurt the very wealthy, but past experience shows us it won’t be long before government agents are digging through our homes, assessing the value of the wedding ring grandma passed down so we can be taxed on it.

Not to be outdone, cranky septuagenarian socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (who owns three homes in upscale areas of Vermont and DC) is calling for even more Americans to be taxed at higher rates, with a 1% tax on net worth above $32 million, topping out at 8% for those with assets over $8 billion. He has also proposed a new tax on corporations based on the wage gap between CEO pay and that of the median worker.

This is wrong as a matter of sound tax policy, and it is morally reprehensible.

As a matter of tax policy, it has been tried and it has failed. Higher taxes lead to lower productivity, a shrinking economy, and less prosperity. Those most in need suffer the most because the wealthy have plenty of ways to shield their money from confiscatory tax rates, including simply moving, as New York Governor Andrew Cuomo discovered the hard way.

For Democrats, taxes aren’t about raising revenue for the legitimate functions of government. For them, taxes are about “leveling the playing field,” ending “income inequality,” and making the rich “pay their fair share.”

Barack Obama was a master at stoking class hatred, inciting poor and middle-income Americans to support punishing the “rich,” even if that meant hurting themselves.

In 2008, ABC’s Charlie Gibson noted that Obama was calling for a doubling of the capital-gains tax rate, but pointed out that “in each instance, when the rate dropped, revenues from the tax increased; the government took in more money. And in the 1980s, when the tax was increased to 28 percent, the revenues went down… So why raise it at all, especially given the fact that 100 million people in this country own stock and would be affected?”

Obama refused to back down, declaring that (even if it meant less tax revenue to fund programs for the poor and needy) he would do it “for purposes of fairness.”

Fairness for whom? The more than five million small-business owners who risked their life savings to start a business, worked 70-80 hour weeks for years to make it successful, employing tens of millions of their fellow Americans in the process, only to be hammered by taxes as a “reward” for their hard work, dedication, and sacrifice? How is it “fair” or moral to punish someone for working harder, working smarter, being more innovative, sacrificing more, and risking more than their neighbor?

The beauty of the free market is that, in order for someone to become a millionaire or billionaire, they must provide a good or service that millions of people desire. In a true free market, you simply can’t get wealthy without improving the lives of countless others.

Bernie Sanders declares his view that “There should be no billionaires.” But would Americans truly be better off if Sam Walton had not revolutionized commerce with his high-volume, low-margin model that allows tens of millions of Americans to afford goods previously out of reach? Would Americans today be happier without iPhones? Would we be better off without the millions of jobs created thanks to Bill Gates and his Windows software?

Would we be better off without these millionaires and billionaires?

No. So why punish them, and ourselves in the process?

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Trump Declines Dems' Invitation to Impeachment Hoax

President Donald Trump is done playing the Democrats' impeachment game. On Tuesday, the White House sent an eight-page letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Reps. Adam Schiff, Eliot Engel, and Elijah Cummings essentially telling them to put up or shut up. The letter highlighted the fact that Pelosi and Democrats have violated the Constitution, "the rule of law, and every past precedent" in their politically partisan quest to see Trump impeached. The letter, written by Trump attorney Pat Cipollone, bluntly exposes the Democrats' true political motivation:

Put simply, you seek to overturn the results of the 2016 election and deprive the American people of the President they have freely chosen. Many Democrats now apparently view impeachment not only as a means to undo the democratic results of the last election, but as a strategy to influence the next election, which is barely more than a year away. As one member of Congress explained, he is "concerned that if we don't impeach the President, he will get reelected." Your highly partisan and unconstitutional effort threatens grave and lasting damage to our democratic institutions, to our system of free elections, and to the American people.

Cipollone asserts that Pelosi and company's impeachment inquiry is invalid because no vote was held in the House or even in a House committee to initiate the current inquiry. Instead, Pelosi unilaterally "announced an 'official impeachment inquiry.'" Cipollone writes, "Your contrived process is unprecedented in the history of the Nation, and lacks the necessary authorization for a valid impeachment proceeding."

As a result of Pelosi's invalid initiation of an impeachment inquiry, Cipollone points out that Trump's due-process rights have been violated. While Democrat-led committees subpoena White House officials demanding compliance under threats of obstruction charges, Trump on the other hand is denied the right to confront witnesses against him, to call his own witnesses, and "to have the assistance of counsel." All of those things would be afforded him if Pelosi were to actually hold a House vote to officially launch an impeachment inquiry.

The letter concludes, "The President cannot allow your constitutionally illegitimate proceedings to distract him and those in the Executive Branch from their work on behalf of the American people."

Predictably, Pelosi responded with her own letter alleging that Trump is the one guilty of trying "to normalize lawlessness," ridiculously adding that "he is trying to make lawlessness a virtue." And once again Pelosi vacuously asserts that Trump's "actions threaten our national security, violate our Constitution and undermine the integrity of our elections." She further asserts that the White House is engaged in a "cover-up" of Trump's "betrayal of our democracy." It will be interesting to see if Pelosi moves forward with an impeachment vote, or if she continues to drag out her lawless charade.

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McConnell Turning Tables on Democrat Impeachers

"The way that impeachment stops is with a Senate majority with me as majority leader."

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell sees it for what it is, and the upper chamber of Congress, which will try President Donald Trump if and when the House ever gets around to impeaching him, will prove to be the sane chamber. In a campaign video, McConnell says that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is “in the clutches of a left-wing mob that finally convinced her to impeach the president.” However, he adds. “The way that impeachment stops is with a Senate majority with me as majority leader.”

McConnell must firmly believe that there is not enough evidence to oust Trump or he wouldn’t assert this far in advance that the Senate will kill the effort. He’s also clearly hanging this political charade around Democrat necks.

On a final note, Democrats have, for effect, compared the proposed Trump impeachment with that of Richard Nixon — but there is a BIG difference and it betrays a remarkable double standard.

Nixon was rightly impeached and resigned because he attempted to conceal the fact that operatives within his administration used FBI and CIA personnel to uncover what they believed were communist influencers in the Democrat Party. That was exposed with the botched attempt to steal DNC files from its office in the Watergate building — though, notably, Nixon was not orchestrating these tactics.

However, in the case of both the 2016 Russia-collusion hoax and the current Ukraine quid-pro-quo hoax, Democrats are the ones using deep-state operatives within the FBI and CIA to frame a sitting president to obstruct his agenda across the board. Don’t wait on The Washington Post to devote six months of headlines to the Democrat deep-state conspiracy.

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Ten Hours of Testimony for nothing
 
Kurt Volker, the former U.S. envoy to Ukraine, testified on Capitol Hill Thursday for nearly 10 hours. He was one of the first witnesses deposed in the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry.

I’m pretty sure that if our brave men and women at Gitmo interrogated a jihadist for ten hours, the left would be yelling that it was torture. But that didn’t stop Democrats from interrogating Volker for ten hours.

And, of course, they did it behind closed doors, presumably because they were touching on classified subjects. Or maybe they just didn’t want the American people to hear what Volker had to say. I suspect it was the latter because Republicans came out of the hearing unfazed.

Rep. Jim Jordan, the ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, told reporters that “not one thing [Volker] said comports with any of the Democrats’ impeachment narrative. Not one thing.”

Rep. Adam Schiff left the hearing and told reporters that he had no comment. Schiff’s silence speaks volumes. If Volker’s testimony had been damaging to Trump, Schiff would have had plenty to say.

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Surprise Medical Billing Must Be Stopped

Have you ever had this happen to you? You or a loved one gets sick, you check and double-check your insurance and find a provider in your insurance network, make an appointment and see that provider. You pay the co-pays and pick up the drugs the doctor prescribed. All seems fine until weeks later, you get an unexpected, and very expensive, bill for services you thought your insurance provider covered. This is called surprise medical billing, and if it has happened to you, you’re far from alone.

Here’s how it works: People go into facilities that are in their insurance network. In fact, if you’re like me you’ll call your insurance provider or at least check its website to make sure the facility is in-network so you won’t get slapped with charges above and beyond the premiums, co-pays, deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums, which already add up to a lot of money.

Even when patients are told that yes, this facility is in-network, they often get a surprise bill after the fact. The bill says that while the facility was covered, one of the medical providers was not, and patients are expected to make up the difference. How was the patient even supposed to know that? Medical insurance companies want to pretend they’re entirely innocent in the shady practice known as surprise medical billing. They’re not.

This happens far more often than you might imagine. According to a study by Stanford University, almost 40 percent of American patients have been hit by surprise medical billing.

This may technically be legal, but it is unfair and unjust and in extreme cases can turn even fairly routine illness into a financial crisis. It’s not an overstatement to say that the existence of widespread practices like this one call the entire American medical system’s legitimacy into question.

America’s health insurance companies say that this is not their fault. They point out that equity firms have bought up a lot of medical practices and have driven billing costs up. The message is: blame the other guy.

They’re not wrong and this is a problem, but it’s not the whole story. American insurance companies are Goliaths who want to pretend to be Davids. The five largest insurance companies will generate more revenue in 2019 than the five biggest tech companies according to Axios.

In forging their agreements with medical facilities, American insurance companies have created a problem for us, known as “skinny networks.” These are networks that are not broad enough to meet the needs of all of their clients.

To a certain extent, this is understandable. People come to doctors and other medical specialists with a wide variety of problems. Even a diligent insurance company can only foresee so many problems and thus only strike a deal with so many problem-solvers.

But really, when, let’s say, most anesthesiologists or many emergency room doctors are not covered by a network agreement, whose fault is that? It’s clear that while equity firms are not making the problem any better, health insurance companies share a portion of the blame for surprise billing as well. Patients really have no way of anticipating the after-doctor sticker shock.

The best solution would be to make sure, first of all, that this is not the patients’ problem and, second, that no party – not insurance companies, not private practitioners, not medical facilities, not equity firms – has the power to lord it over the others.

A bill in Congress called the STOP Surprise Medical Bills Act would stop surprise medical billing. Rather than arguing about blame for what has gone wrong, it would simply force all the parties to fix the problem and not trouble patients about it.

When bills come to the insurance company that are out of network, rather than pass that bill on to you, the insurance company would be required to enter into binding arbitration with that provider, and hammer out a deal.

This approach has been tried in New York and it has already saved thousands and thousands of people from the national plague of surprise medical billing. Congress should replicate this success story for all American patients.

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IN BRIEF

UKRAINE PROBE: "A newly unearthed document shows that Ukrainian officials had opened a new probe into the firm linked to Hunter Biden months before President Trump's phone call with that country's leader." (Fox News)

COSTLY INSURANCE UNDER OBAMACARE: "Health insurance now costs the average American family over $20,000 annually, according to a recent survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation. The foundation’s chief executive, Drew Altman, noted, “It’s as much as buying a basic economy car, but buying it every year.” Bloomberg reports, “While employers pay most of the cost of coverage, according to the survey, workers’ average contribution is now $6,000 for a family plan. That’s just their share of upfront premiums, and doesn’t include co-payments, deductibles and other forms of cost-sharing once they need care.” -- Patriot Post

NOKO STATUS QUO: "Working-level nuclear talks in Sweden between officials from Pyongyang and Washington have broken off, North Korea's top negotiator said late on Saturday, dashing prospects for an end to months of stalemate." (Reuters)

NARRATIVE BUSTER: Women and minorities are fueling an increase in concealed-handgun permits (John Lott)

TOO LITTLE TOO LATE: Bloomberg Law finally retracts its false and misleading "anti-Semitic" story involving Department of Labor official Leif Olson (The Volokh Conspiracy)

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