"It profits me but little that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquillity of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life."

--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Here's an Idea

Obama wants to tax the wealthy?   Here's an idea.    Seven of the ten wealthiest counties in America are the counties surrounding Washington, D.C.   And the Washington Post reports today that nearly 5,400 former congressional staffers have left Capitol Hill to become federal lobbyists in the past 10 years.   The pigs who feed at the government trough on our tax dollars have done very, very well, even while the rest of the country has suffered through a deep recession.   How about a 100% surtax on post-government employment for income over $200,000?   Just confiscate it.   Wouldn't the liberals be in favor of that?   Wouldn't those lawyer-lobbyists who leave government employment be OK with "only" making $200,000 a year?   After all, that would in most cases, if not all, be more than they made in government service, wouldn't it?   Not much more, I grant you -- here is a webpage where you can get salaries for federal government employees.... the first ten names alphabetically in the Department of Energy, six of them made more than $119,000 in 2010.  

Of course, the real solution is to cut whole government programs, cut the staff of all remaining government programs by 20%, and then cut the salaries of everyone remaining after that by 20%.   The federal government has become a mechanism for transferring wealth, but not from the wealthy to the poor.   Instead, it's become a mechanism for transferring wealth from the working middle-class in Middle America to the significantly wealthier governing class in Washington.   It has to stop.  

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