So the press is going ga-ga over "Joe the Plumber" and one article by the Toledo Blade quoted Mr. Wurzelbacher as saying this about Obama’s plan to raise the income tax for those making more than $250,000:
Is it right to take someone’s money because they work a little harder? It’s taking away from someone’s hard work.
According to divorce records "Joe the Plumber" pulled in $40,000 in 2006.
Impregnated in Joe’s comment above implies two things:
- That those who make more money work harder.
- The more you make the less you should be taxed.
So that must mean, by Joe’s (faulty) logic, that he doesn’t work hard and that he should be taxed more.
Joe is not that bright.
Obviously, people’s income has hardly anything to do with how hard they work. If that were the case than Warren Buffet must have the most dangerous, hardest and time-consuming job imaginable. Oprah Winfrey must make coal miners look unemployed. Bill Gates apparently puts in 25 hours of non-stop work a day.
And, yes, people who make more money ought to pay a higher tax percentage.
Even Thomas Jefferson understood this:
Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.
In a society where income inequality is growing rapidly out of control one way to reign that in is progressive taxation. We are a society. The concept of symbiosis or solidarity is deeply embedded in it. Those who have more should give more and those who have less should give less. It’s a straight forward idea. And when considering how vile and corrupt our economic system is and what is the normal procedure for accruing wealth (various forms of anti-social behavior) it makes even more sense to remedy the systemic inequalities with some kind of progressive taxation system.
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