THE TOP TEN PERCENT

Can it be true?

The federal income tax system of the United States “…exempts almost half the country from paying for programs that benefit everyone, including national defense, public safety, infrastructure and education. It is a system in which the top 10 percent of earners…paid about 73 percent of the income taxes collected by the federal government.”

The AP reported this little item in our local paper last week.

We have not checked it out…but we believe it. Sometimes the msm gets it right.

And if it is right, it explains a few things and raises a few concerns.

It explains why so many of our citizens are paying so little attention to the effects of b.o.’s tax strategies. It explains why the msm is paying so little attention, because so much of the msm's audience has no interest in something that seems to cost it little or nothing.

And because so many, and soon so many more, of our citizens will be getting so many new, costly benefits for which they are not personally paying, as far as they can tell, the importance of personally being responsible for paying for any of them will become a thing of the past.

Paying for those benefits will become the responsibility of the government, or more exactly, the responsibility of 10 percent of taxpayers to pay for 73 percent of those benefits.

Something happens to lots of folks who get good things and who do not pay for them.

A few of those things:

They do not see any need to work for the good things.
They do not understand the complexities of delivery.
They are eventually provided with a cheapened product.
They take little or no interest in making sure the delivery system is maintained, responsibly.
Folks become dependent on government, as never before.
What was a valued product to be worked for and sacrificed for, becomes an entitlement, something which is available for all, a freebie.

The problem, of course, is that entitlements are not free.

World class benefits, of any kind, cost big money, and to provide them free of charge to all is impossible.

An important definition to keep in mind:

Economics is the study of the use of scarce resources in order to make and distribute goods.

Programs that benefit everyone are goods. They are derived from scarce resources.

Scarce is the operative word.

They must be paid for.

Scarce means that there is a limited amount of such resources.

Fewer and fewer people are paying.

The resources are getting scarcer.

THERE WILL BE A REDUCTION IN QUANTITY AND/OR QUALITY of goods if scarce resources are the basis of greater and greater distributions of entitlements.

This is a no-brainer.

Think about it a little as we enter into another election cycle.