Class Warfare Continues With Clinton
After nearly 8 years of listening to Obama talk incessantly about the need for the wealthy to “pay their fair share,” Hillary Clinton has picked up the mantle in her new tax proposal unveiled this week.
Clinton spoke about the need for “an additional 4 percent tax on people making more than $5 million per year, calling the tax a “fair share surcharge.” It is reminiscent of the failed “Buffet Rule” proposal put forth by Obama a few years back.
According to a Clinton staffer, “This surcharge is a direct way to ensure that effective rates rise for taxpayers who are avoiding paying their fair share, and that the richest Americans pay an effective rate higher than middle-class families.”
The tax proposal is calculated to bring in $150 billion on revenue over a ten-year span. Nowhere does it calculate the cost of implementing such a plan, additional paperwork, hours spent on compliance and enforcement, and so forth. As a revenue raiser, it amounts to $15 billion a year for the federal government, pocket change really — something that could be more easily attained by cutting the size and scope of many federal budgets.
It’s not really about revenue anyway. It’s more about pandering to a segment of voters, vilifying the high income earners and stirring up class warfare. It was the one message that resonated most with Obama supporters in 2012; he continuously and intentionally railed against “millionaires and billionaires”, and talked about “the wealthy paying their fair share” in order to create a divide and separate that particular fiscal population from the rest of “mainstream America”. Hillary is merely following the leftist playbook and recycling stale ideas as her candidacy flounders.
