1. It kills personal and professional incentive
2. It rewards underperformance and lack of achievement
3. It forces companies to drastically re-calculate their bottom lines, which means layoffs and hiring freezes
4. It is the financial equivalent of throwing a inflatable duckie to a person caught up in a raging sea
5. It merely buys votes
6. It is discriminatory, assuming that those who haven’t achieved probably cannot
7. It placates the poor, like giving a motivational Valium to an already half-hearted potential worker
8. It teaches entire generations to depend more and more on the Government
9. It teaches the poor to hate and blame the rich, distracting them from identifying and combating their own problems
10. It discourages investment for individuals’ wealth building plans and retirement plans
11. It severely discourages investment for venture capitalists, the effect of which means less start-ups and therefore fewer jobs

“You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help small men by tearing down big men. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatreds. You cannot build character and courage by taking away a man’s initiative and independence.”

- William Boetcker, early 1900’s Presbyterian minister and lecturer

Why? Two things you must keep in mind. Companies and corporations never pay taxes. People do. Tax the company more and it’ll just increase their cost of doing business. As any business owner knows, when you and all your competitors have a identical simultaneous increase in your cost of doing business, it’s pretty safe to assume you can increase the price to your end-user. If the government added a $100 tax to all web developers per week, you can bet every single web developer in the United States would adjust their rates to reflect it. What’s that? You say someone could circumvent this by simply outsourcing? Why, I think you’ve stumbled upon the force behind outsourcing there, Watson!

The second thing to keep in mind is this: a Democrat who promises to raise taxes will absolutely do so. And it will be much farther reaching than promised.

As candidate, Mr. Clinton promised to offer tax relief to families with incomes of less than $80,000 a year. He said he would raise taxes on only “the wealthiest 2 percent,” those with incomes above $200,000 a year, and impose a surtax of 10 percent on those with annual incomes of more than $1 million.

Sound familiar? It should. Sounds awfully like Obama’s rhetoric. Let me let you in on a little secret: it’s not about the money. These campaigns have crunched the numbers and know exactly how many people they can attack with class warfare and still win an election. The arbitrary $250,000 threshold — or $120,000 now, perhaps… who knows — isn’t a financially sound conclusion at all. Quit studying his tax plan with such excruciating attention to the threshold. Mark my words and gird your loins, even if Obama were to stick to the $250,000 threshold, that sort of tax on wealth infects the entire economy. Poor people don’t invest. Poor people don’t create jobs. Poor people can barely keep it together themselves. And to my Jewish friends and fellow Christians, don’t forget that last commandment. It may be tenth, but it still counts.

All around this plan is simply wrong. Morally, economically, feasibly. It is bad. The only thing it may do is serve to get Obama elected. Once that’s achieved, the plan can be changed whatever. Its purpose has been fulfilled.

So… how is this plan a good idea again?

David Harsanyi, in his piece If It Redistributes Like a Duck,

Now, I’m not suggesting Obama intends to transform this nation into 1950s-era Soviet tyranny or that he will possess the power to do so. I’m suggesting Obama is praising and mainstreaming an economic philosophy that has failed to produce a scintilla of fairness or prosperity anywhere on earth. Ever.

And there it is. If you could bear to think rationally and get past all the warm, fuzzy hope for change that will hopefully change us — buffered of course by the pointedly objective sense of fairness the government has time and again proven to embody —  the thought may have occurred to you that the kind of change Obama is proposing is certainly a departure… a departure from a system that works remarkably well to a system that has yet to ever prove itself. And believe me, it’s had the opportunity.

It’s not that we don’t have room for improvement economically, but why this ignorant push to throw out the baby with the bath water?

Megyn Kelly rips him apart. It’s fun to watch.

Get it? It’s the fault of Fox News. Fox News is the problem. What’s that? I’m sorry, I didn’t hear what you were saying about Obama, Megyn. I was too busy bloviating about the one cable news network that doesn’t bow to our every whim. Lah lah lah lah lah. Obama has been crystal clear in repeatedly saying that he never said what he was recorded as saying, and if he did say it then he obviously didn’t mean that at all. LAH LAH LAH LAH LAH.

No substance, Bill. None.

And watch now as Obama and friends continue to ban any news network that dares ask The One tough questions.

Looks like the Obamatrons looooooooove the grassroots… until someone from the grassroots releasing a video using Obama’s own words against him. Manufactured by Fox? Really? That’s the best you can come up with? I can’t wait to see what life’s like under this regime.

Really? Digg can’t find more than one story on Redistribution of Wealth? (And an unrelated story, to boot.) Am I misunderestimating its search algorithm or something? I figured it’d be blowing up right about now!

You’ve no doubt been hearing the argument that Obama’s Redistribution of Wealth comment to Joe the Plumber was just a slip. (Even so, a Freudian slip is still quite revealing.) But now, new startling evidence is surfacing that it wasn’t a slip. Rather, it was revealing of an ideology that has been reasoned out by Obama. After the fold, hear the 2001 interview with Obama concerning not if Redistribution of Wealth is right or wrong but how our activist might best achieve it. It’s a foregone conclusion for Obama that it must be done.

More…

1. Notice the treatment of Joe the Plumber by the media, hardcore liberals, and the Obama camp. Speak out against the King and this is what you can expect as well, so think long and hard about it.
2. If you can look past all the distraction about Joe the Plumber not making $250,000, owing back taxes, or loving to kill hobos, you’ll see the whole reason this Youtube video became a sensation in the first place. Barack Obama let slip a major part of his ultimate socialist agenda: the redistribution of wealth.

Favorite bits:

“Joe the Plumber is a regular guy who asked a regular guy question and got Obama into some dire straits. He put Obama on the spot, Obama made a gaffe, and the press is just trying to cover it up.”

“It’s like when John Murtha said everybody is western Pennsylvania — which is near me as well — is a bunch of racists. I mean, what planet are these people from Obama’s campaign from!?”

Indeed.

Honestly, how much clearer does The One have to say it for his followers to understand that he does, in fact, propose a redistribution of wealth, a tenant at the very core of Socialism?

Here’s the Wall Street Journal article they were referencing at the end of the clip: Obama’s 95% Illusion

I don’t really have time for a write-up on this just yet, but I saw it and thought it interesting. Gallup poll:

Americans’ lack of support for redistributing wealth to fix the economy spans political parties: Republicans (by 90% to 9%) prefer that the government focus on improving the economy, as do independents (by 85% to 13%) and Democrats (by 77% to 19%). This sentiment also extends across income groups: upper-income Americans prefer that the government focus on improving the economy and jobs by 88% to 10%, concurring with middle-income (83% to 16%) and lower-income (78% to 17%) Americans.

See the results here.