To the Editor:
“There are only three ways to meet the unpaid bills of a nation. The first is taxation. The second is repudiation. The third is inflation.” Herbert Hoover
In review of Hoover’s quote, Biden is proposing a hike in the federal income tax rate from 37% to 39.6% in his 2023 federal budget. On top of that he’s pushing for taxing unrealized capital gains from stocks and bonds. He’s also pushing for child care credits, elder care credits and reduction in prescription prices. These last items are not bad, just costly. None of this should surprise Biden voters because in 1983 he voted to implement the first tax on social security income at 50%. In 1993 he voted to increase the tax on those benefits to 85%.
But getting back to Hoover, repudiation is next. It wasn’t Biden’s fault about Afghanistan. Nor is the border crisis. Rising gas prices were first due to oil producers now its Putin. The cost of meat was because of corporate greed. Increase in crime is due to guns not the criminal or the lack of prosecution.
Now here we are. Inflation is at everyone’s doorstep. Biden pointed his finger at the economy and blamed the slow economic recovery on the pandemic. In February 2020, before the pandemic, the CPI was 2.3% in March 2021 it ended up at 2.6%. Today it’s a whopping 8.5%.
In 1883 William G. Sumner published “What the Social Classes Owe Each Other”. Sumner said there are four interest groups one is to consider. Group A were the Progressive social planners of his time – late 19th century. Group B were the legislators and bureaucrats of the government. Group C was made up of the large majority of industrious laboring producers who work hard to support their families and improve their situations in life. Group D were the lazy and the drunken, the layabouts who are always looking for handouts.
In the end Sumner stated the A’s decide there is a moral duty to provide charity to the D’s, who they see as victims of economic forces over which they have no control. As an interest group, the A’s lobby the B’s to pass laws to institutionalize such charity, otherwise known as welfare. But here’s the rub. Where is the money to come from? Why, from the C’s of course.
I’ll end with a quote by Vladimir Lenin. “The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.”
Patti Walker,
Fillmore