Who says a President from Arkansas can’t be a class guy? In his sales campaign for his economic package, Bill Clinton is showing that he is the most effective practitioner of class warfare our country has seen since Franklin D. Roosevelt railed against the “economic royalists”
The Class War is the basic organizational strategy that enabled Marxist revolutionaries to take over so many governments. Envy is the touchstone of the Clinton economic rhetoric. No opportunity passes without the President using it to stoke the fires of class enmity.
Clinton repeatedly implies that anyone who is making a lot of money today “got rich in the l980s.” Under the Reaganomics of the 1980s (which eliminated high inflation, unemployment), we had the longest period of economic expansion in our nation’s history and the private sector created 20 million new jobs.
During the years that a Republican President was in the White House, the Democrats constantly whined that those 20 million were all “McDonald’s hamburger-flipping jobs.” Now, Clintonomics Newspeak tells us that Americans made too much money in the ‘80s and that the Reagan years were “the decade of greed.”
But 1et’s talk about the greed of the federal politicians and bureaucrats — overpaid, over-perked, and over-pensioned. — who continue to suck up more and more of the income of working Americans. In all Clinton’s talk about “sacrifice” and “shared burden,” we haven’t heard anything substantive about cutting federal jobs or salaries, downsizing the government, eliminating projects or grants, or giving back the special benefits that the rest of Americans don’t receive. That’s what private companies have to do when they run a deficit.
Clinton never has anything good to say about high earners. The implicit assumption in everything he says about high income earners is that they don’t deserve it, that they must be enjoying ill gotten gains at the expense of others who are being exploited.
That’s the attitude of a man who never made it as a high earner in the private sector. Clinton has the viewpoint of a man who spent practically all his life feeding at the taxpayers’ trough.
Clinton doesn’t feel the need to make even a cursory bow to the “rich” because he knows they are so useful as whipping boys for his tax-and-spend p1ans. He calculates that there are a lot more middle class and poor people who can be energized by his class-war rhetoric than there are rich willing to speak out and defend themselves.
In the short run, he may be correct. In the long run, he is wrong because his policies will work only as long as the middle class and working poor can be fooled into thinking that they are lucky to pay higher taxes (disguised as “broad-based contributions”), since Clinton will soak the “rich” and forced them to pay a great deal more.
In fact, the real purpose of punishing the rich with very high rates (which produce comparatively little revenue) is to make the middle class willing to accept higher taxes (which produce massive revenues to finance the social welfare bureaucracy).
Clinton’s entire economic plan is based on taking more and more money from those who have earned and saved, and transferring it to the politicians and bureaucrats to spend. This can only lead to a shrinking economy, as those who put forth extraordinary effort discover that the results of their extra efforts will be taxed away, and that they are scorned for even trying to excel.
Clinton’s economic plan clearly hits private investors the hardest. Rate increases from 31 percent to over 40 percent (when you factor in the proposed increases in Medicare taxes and pension limitations) represent a 30 percent increase in the marginal tax rate. But private investment comes from those successful enough to put money aside.
In Bill Clinton’s lexicon, high earners are not “working Americans.” “Working Americans” are “people whose votes I think I can get if I can make them mad enough at the rich.”
But the plain fact is that most high earners earn their high incomes by working hard and working smart. Ask anyone, for example, who is employed in a small, successful business, if the owner is a hard worker.
Or go to a 1aw office on a snow day or weekends and observe the ratio of attorneys to support staff. Or delve into the background of any entrepreneur who founded a big company. It’s always the same story of hard work and long hours.
It’s too bad that some politicians are falsely telling the people that government is the solution to their problems. It isn’t; it’s the problem. The voters should rise up and say, “Read our lips, President Clinton and Congress. No new taxes. Anyone who doesn’t understand that will be Bushed.”
