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Tax ‘em bloodless

November 21st, 2009

Hold onto your hats, folks, because Doc Zero is arguing for new punitive taxes on a particular industry, and I am in complete agreement:

Centuries ago, at the beginning of the Obama Administration, we were told that the “obscene” bonuses of AIG executives should be taxed away, with special taxes that amounted to bills of attainder. This is not the first time we’ve seen specific industries targeted with massive taxes because they were deemed immoral. The outstanding example is the tobacco industry, which the government uses as a trained vampire, sending it forth to suck tax revenue from the lungs of smokers. Big Oil gets soaked with a lot of taxes, too, justified in part by the merciless profiteering and environmental disdain of its chief executives. Of course, Big Tobacco and Big Oil still make money, but the government makes more from their products than they do.

One industry has thus far been able to escape punitive taxation, despite routinely employing shadowy accounting practices, spending fantastic amounts of money, and reaping obscene profits. It produces a product that often causes significant damage to the social environment. It raises its price to the consumer relentlessly, with no measurable increase in quality. Top employees can rake in $20 million or more in a single year, while frequently maintaining foreign residences to escape high tax rates. They often extract fat paychecks from their companies, even when their failures cost the company staggering amounts of money. While it generates much of its income in the United States, it’s one of the worst industries for outsourcing jobs overseas.

It’s time to tap the last untouched golden vein in the American economic bloodstream.

Yes, it surely is. Read on, and enjoy. It’s really too bad that it’ll never, ever happen. But in a more just world, it damned well would. It’s way past time to let sanctimonious limousine liberals who advocate the most vociferously for high taxes on everyone but themselves put their enormous fortunes and obscene profits where there fat yaps are.

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  1. Noel
    November 21st, 2009 at 15:29 | #1
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    David Stockman, Reagan's first budget director before he went native:

    [Reagan] had once been on the Laffer curve himself. "I came into the Big Money making pictures during World War II," he would always say. At that time the wartime income surtax hit 90 percent. "You could only make four pictures and then you were in the top bracket," he would continue. "So we all quit working after four pictures and went off to the country." High tax rates caused less work. Low tax rates caused more. His experience proved it.

    It is tempting, though, to make artists pay for the NEA rather the NEA paying artists. Ironically, it was another Hollywood troglodyte who saved the NEA: Charlton Heston.

    In a dramatic moment in January 1995, Charlton Heston (who had served on the National Council for the Arts in its earliest years) teamed up with Ronald Reagan's NEA head, Frank Hodsoll, to convince Congress that the endowment did other things beside cultivate art that stumbled over the line into pornography and blasphemy. Heston cited the work being done by "little theaters, little orchestras, little museums" in places away from the big cities, organizations that simply wouldn't exist without the NEA's help. He noted that, at its best, the NEA had the potential to preserve and showcase America's (and the West's) artistic and cultural heritage. "I think conservatives generally agree that such a result is a public good," Heston said. "Certainly this one does." Heston was pointing the way forward for the embattled agency, one that would be seized on by two of its chairmen: Bill Ivey (1998-2001) and Dana Gioia (2003-09). It was a matter of necessity.

    If Rocco tries to bring back the bad old days--and especially with any Obama propaganda--he'll quickly find Americans are in no mood to be insulted with their own tax dollars, especially in a tight economy.

    There is, of course, one other Evil Growth Industry that could be taxed: Big Lawsuit.

    And we really should find a way to tax and regulate the biggest and most pernicious industry of them all:

    Big Government.

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