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I know the subject matter in which I’m about to weave my verbal brilliance is nothing new. Regardless, I find it necessary to write this piece because I’ve yet to see anyone do it.
Ironically enough I’m about to quote a Bible verse. One of the things I’ve learned from the Bible is that there’s nothing new under the sun. Yet still, I offer the following thoughts and ponderings under the premise that maybe, just maybe no one has thought of it.
Alright gang, get your Bible out. What version? Don’t care.
Look at Matthew 19:16-21 (The following text is from the NKJV)
16 Now behold, one came and said to Him, “Good[e] Teacher, what good thing shall I do that I may have eternal life?”
17 So He said to him, “Why do you call Me good?[f] No one is good but One, that is, God.[g] But if you want to enter into life, keep the commandments.”
18 He said to Him, “Which ones?”
Jesus said, “ ‘You shall not murder,’ ‘You shall not commit adultery,’ ‘You shall not steal,’ ‘You shall not bear false witness,’ 19 ‘Honor your father and your mother,’[h] and, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”[i]
20 The young man said to Him, “All these things I have kept from my youth.[j] What do I still lack?”
21 Jesus said to him, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.”
Pasted from <http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+19-20&version=NKJV>
You do see where I’m going with this don’t you?
Here in the information age, our lexicon perpetually changes at the speed of political correctivity. Case in point, let’s discuss the term “balanced approach”. At the beginning of the year, ladies and gentlemen, that term carried a completely different meaning than it does today. Back then, it really wasn’t any more than a figure of speech which could be attributed to just about anything.
Nowadays (8 months later), it means tax hikes for the rich.
I don’t really have to tell you how the term took on that meaning in just a matter of months do I? I would assume that by now you’re familiar with the power of the bully pulpit which is strategically and frequently wielded by TOTUS & The Symbiant. Please don’t make me do any further level setting here. I’m trying to be brief.
Anyway, the general consensus among the White House, the Democrats in Congress, and the left wing talking heads in the media is that in order for this great country of ours to solve it’s great debt woes, it must bite the bullet by making an already excessive progressive tax code more *ahem* progressive. In the English to PC / PC to English dictionary, that means they want to make the rich pay more taxes.
I gotta tell you. I would have never, ever, seen that one coming from any of the aforementioned savants.
Just to drive their point home, they get some of the rich souls among their ideology to come out in favor of such a measure. You know who I’m talking about. The President himself has a self serving, yet eloquent way of talking about it when he discusses the Bush tax cuts. “People like me didn’t request a tax cut…….”
Hypocritical weasels. Every last one of them.
Of course, the best response to these people is the one where they are subsequently challenged to go ahead and pay more to the IRS. No one is stopping them. We’ve heard that one by now, haven’t we? Of course. It’s nothing new.
What I would really, really, like to see is one of these guilty conscious do-gooders actually respond to the challenge and voluntarily pony up a big wad of cash to Uncle Sam in the name of paying their fair share.
Have you ever tried to pay extra money to the IRS? Certainly IRS Form 1040 has a box for you to check if you want to donate $3 to Presidential campaigns which buy buses and tour the midwest touting the eminent introduction of some no bang for the buck jobs program which is documented on a 2 inch square Post-It Note in someone’s middle desk drawer. Those of us who have filed taxes on something other than a magic slate (the predecessor to the tablet PC) have seen that box plenty of times and wondered if it would up our tax bill or not. At the same time, we’ve never seen a similar box asking for us to voluntarily pay more than what’s already being confiscated from us.
When was the last time you saw a headline either here on the internet or in a newspaper reporting that some fat cat Wall Street type voluntarily paid extra taxes? More often or not, you typically see reports of the well-to-do crowd giving butt loads of money to chosen charities. Ted Turner did it. The Facebook guy did it. Even the medias favorite rich guy who wants to pay more taxes has done it.
We could go into the suggested reasons as to why they gave to certain charities instead of the government. That of course would reveal certain hypocrisies which would subsequently cast the ideologies of said individuals in a negative light. I’ll do that some other time.
Regardless, one of the stated goals of a more progressiver (that’s a word, you saw it here first) tax code is to turn around and give it to the poor. Easy as that. It would seem that the rich guys who speak up about the need for the rich to pay more taxes would seek to get as much of their wealth to the poor via taxation in order to obtain a certain level of perfection. Don’t you think?
But of course, I left out verse 22 from the passage in Matthew I quoted before. It seems to add a certain level of clarity to the discussion.
