Taxes Still Bite

In the face of a crumbling Social Security and Medicare system. More and more retirees will be looking to dividend income and capital gains to supplement their savings withdrawals and maintain some semblence of a comfortable life style. But as usual, the Left, who considers the "rich" to be anyone making $50,000 or more have targeted these two areas for considerable tax increases through the expiration of the Bush Tax cuts.

Why?

Simply because they fear miilions of voters who are not dependent on Social Security to live on. If these people are not dependent on a government program for their survival, then they cannot be manipulated by politicians the way our Seniors have been over the last 30 years.

The goal of Leftism is power through the creation of the dependent welfare class who will keep them in power out of fear of losing the governmental life-line.

From IBD:
Posted 4/11/2006

Taxes: Hillary Clinton ducks a question and sends a signal to any Republican sharp enough to see it: Americans don't want Washington taking more of their money.

As she travels across the land laying the groundwork for 2008, Sen. Clinton has become a sort of political compass — pointing from the left, her old ideological home, to the center, where she wants to be accepted. So it's interesting what she did not say, when given a chance, about taxes.

In a Monday interview with Bloomberg's Al Hunt, she was asked whether she thought George W. Bush's tax cuts — specifically the cut to a 15% maximum rate on capital gains — should be rolled back. The exchange (according to an unofficial transcript from the Chicago Sun-Times) went like this:

Hunt: I know that you and most Democrats advocate rolling back the Bush tax cuts for the very wealthy. Do you think a 15% capital gains tax rate, then, is too low?

Clinton: You know, Al, I think we have to look at the whole package. You know, I obviously am an adherent to the Clinton economic policies. I believe in fiscal responsibility, and I know there are some who come on your shows and say, "That's outdated — we don't need it." I think that's a very dangerous position to take. We need to figure out what is it we're trying to achieve and then we have to look to see on both the spending side and the taxing side how we get there.

Elsewhere in the interview, Clinton sounds the standard Democratic Party theme that "the rich are getting richer" and everyone else is "marching in place." She calls for a "national conversation about health care," which (given her own past) could fairly be read as a call for bigger government. Such talk might well have the goal of whetting the public's appetite for more spending, for which higher taxes naturally would be needed.

But Clinton's shuffle on the question of whether to hike a specific tax — indeed, a tax that largely hits the rich — suggests that she doesn't see the public in a tax-me mood just yet. It wasn't in such a mood when John Kerry went down to defeat in 2004 while proposing to roll back the capital-gains cut. And even as the media routinely describe pending tax increases as the mere expiration of tax cuts (as if the taxes somehow don't go up), we have a feeling the public isn't fooled.

And what of the Republicans? The party that controls both houses of Congress still can't get a bill passed to extend the current capital-gains and dividend rates. Arcane budget procedures are partly to blame. But the GOP would be able to get the job done if it were less timid and had a better sense of its own (as well as the nation's) interests. After all, voters still look to Republicans to keep taxes down. If Republicans can't do that, then they lose their best, and maybe last, selling point.