NY Times—Full Of Crap…Again (Updated Version)

Check out this story in today’s NY Times Online

Richest Are Leaving Even The Rich Far Behind

“When F. Scott Fitzgerald pronounced that the very rich "are different from you and me," Ernest Hemingway's famously dismissive response was: "Yes, they have more money." Today he might well add: much, much, much more money.

The people at the top of America's money pyramid have so prospered in recent years that they have pulled far ahead of the rest of the population, an analysis of tax records and other government data by The New York Times shows. They have even left behind people making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Call them the hyper-rich.

They are not just a few Croesus-like rarities. Draw a line under the top 0.1 percent of income earners - the top one-thousandth. Above that line are about 145,000 taxpayers, each with at least $1.6 million in income and often much more.

The average income for the top 0.1 percent was $3 million in 2002, the latest year for which averages are available. That number is two and a half times the $1.2 million, adjusted for inflation, that group reported in 1980. No other income group rose nearly as fast.

President Bush said during the third election debate last October that most of the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income Americans. In fact, most - 53 percent - will go to people with incomes in the top 10 percent over the first 15 years of the cuts, which began in 2001 and would have to be reauthorized in 2010. And more than 15 percent will go just to the top 0.1 percent, those 145,000 taxpayers.”

Normally I would ask the rhetorical question: “so what’s their point?”

Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, the NY Times point is all too clear here—class envy and class warfare.

They even go to the trouble to quote a few wealthy liberals in an effort to make their point:

“But some of the wealthiest Americans, including Warren E. Buffett, George Soros and Ted Turner, have warned that such a concentration of wealth can turn a meritocracy into an aristocracy and ultimately stifle economic growth by putting too much of the nation's capital in the hands of inheritors rather than strivers and innovators.”

I guess it’s easy enough for Buffet, Soros, and Turner to lament the evils of being rich—since THEY ALREADY HAVE MADE THEIR FORTUNES. So they want to go out and tax the rest of the producers in the economy and provide additional barriers for achieving success in the form of increased taxes on income and capital gains.

I’m sorry, but the entire logic of this article is typically one sided and flawed. What the heck is wrong with people succeeding and making LOTS of money. The Times acts like the high income earners are stealing their money or otherwise not earning it, and that it is somehow a sin for the government to let the people that EARNED the money KEEP more of it on April 15th.

The other significant fact that the NY Times refuses to admit is this. Most of the households they define as “rich” ($100K-500K per year income) are simply dual income families with two college grad wage earners. They aren’t making that kind of money sitting by the pool sipping mint juleps—two people are working their asses off for 25 or 30 years each.

And the article’s so-called “hyper rich?” Like it or not, the “hyper rich” are also business owners and investors putting all of their “riches” back into the market by providing working capital so businesses can provide jobs for all of the “working families” the Times is so intent in protecting and proving tax refunds, rebates, and credits to. To hear the Times tell it, the wealthy Americans make their money, then bury it in their back yard or stuff it in their mattress—never to be seen again unless the government steps in and recovers it for use through taxation.

As I’ve said over and over and over before…

YOU CANNOT GET A TAX REFUND OR TAX CUT IF YOU DO NOT PAY TAXES!

As I wrote way back in September 2004 in my posting Tax Cuts For Working Families:

"Seriously folks, how can you cut taxes on someone that already doesn’t pay taxes? The bottom 20% of income earners already gets an earned income credit and a resulting tax refund equaling 5.7% of their non-taxable income. The bottom 40% of households earned 9.7% of the total household income and had a negative tax rate of 2.8%. This means, even after Bush’s tax reform, that the imperial federal government of the United States uses the IRS to take money from the top 60% of income earners and give it to the bottom 40%. The Dem’s figure that if they can just increase this figure from 40% to 51% that they will be guaranteed re-election to local and national offices for eternity."

Now they’re (the Dems) working on getting these same poor souls out of paying their own Medicare and Social Security tax. It is somehow considered to be unfair to make a "working family" pay one thin dime toward the cost of their own retirement and government supplied medical care. Satellite TV, yearly trips to Disney, beer, cigarettes, unplanned children, and bass boats are obvious higher priorities than education, hard work, planning and savings.

They want refunds and benefits for “working families”, but the Times insists that it is the duty of all of those mean old “HYPER RICH” to dam well by God pay for it through taxation.

I am so SICK of this refrain...