Kim Murphy at Lati reports:
A TV spot for a proposed new income tax on the state's wealthiest citizens shows Microsoft founder Bill Gates' 84-year-old father, William Gates Sr., plunged by giggling kids into a dunk tank and left to drip in his wet khakis and Oxford shirt.Expect these characters to be on the frontlines advocating higher federal taxes, once MSM starts to promote the growing deficit crisis, after the mid-term elections.
"Some people say Initiative 1098 is about soaking the rich. But it's really about doing something for the next generation," Gates says. "You see, state cutbacks have put our kids at risk, and we can't just sit here and do nothing about it."...
The fight over what would be Washington's first state income tax since 1933 is shaping up as a battle of the titans: Both the elder Gates, a prominent retired lawyer and philanthropist, and his son, the richest man in America, are backing I-1098. But three of the state's other biggest businessmen — current Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and John Nordstrom of the Seattle-based retail chain — are throwing big money into the campaign to defeat it.
I'm still not sure what's behind this Gates family madness. Are they just self-hating rich, or are they somehow playing a more complex game?
If the Gates were really serious about taxing the wealthy (ie people like themselves), they would propose a tax system not based income alone but on a persons net worth, so that someone like a Gates, would be taxes on all income at the highest possible level and someone building an estate would be taxes at the much lower rates to encourage more capital accumulation.
ReplyDeleteIf the Gates were serious about taxing the wealthy, they would be argue in favor of doing away with the biggest scam ever created by the wealthy--tax exempt bonds.
If the Gates were serious about taxing the wealthy they would propose taxes that treated all income (Ordinary, Capital Gains, no dividends, interest, etc)the same.
Instead the Gates are about taxing the wealth accumulators (those actively building their wealth) while at the same time hopefully keeping other wealthy people from moving onto their turf and thus diluting their power base.
If I had a very high net worth and wanted to keep the power that my wealth afforded me, I would be pushing for 90% tax rates on most income types. That would make my accumulated wealth worth even more while at the same time, preserving or even increasing the power that I derived from my accumulated fortune.
It seems that some wealthy people come to a point that they no longer remember or understand what it is like when they were starting out building their fortunes. They forget that part of the reason people take risk is the belief that they can become wealthy too. When you make the top tax rates higher, it not only kills the entrepreneurial spirit in those who are impacted by the higher taxes, it also kills the spirit of those at the bottom that see that the only reward for hard work and risk taking is having more of your income confiscated by government.
Lastly, I know that many people will argue that high tax rates in the past didn't seem to hurt things all that much, so why would they now. What people that believe this don't understand about the high tax rates of the past is that with those high tax rates came lots of tax evasion. The only people that paid the top rate on all of their income, were people working for some else. Tax evasion was rampant in business in the high rate tax days. Businesses could get away with it because of the difficulty government auditors had in tracking income. Today, with electronic records that track just about everything and world wide reporting system, tax evasion is much, much harder. So as rates rise even to 50%, we are for the most part moving into uncharted waters as to what people/businesses will do to avoid paying the higher taxes. Anyone that thinks they will do nothing is a fool. A key fundamental in building wealth is knowing how to protect it.
The Gates' are eugenicists and gov/Mil contractors. Their goal is to enrich the elite and grow government. That is what this proposition will do. It sets the stage to get an income tax through the door and incrementally adjust it to lower incomes. It also keeps people from Oregon fleeing to Washington (PDX to Vancouver) in order to escape the Communist Tax Rapers in Portland, as well as tax shell companies. The Gates family is true scum or the earth.
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