Senator Sanders

Senator Sanders, a democratic candidate for president is misguided in his attempt to spread the wealth around. He is suggesting raising the top income tax rate to somewhere between 50 and 90 percent depending on what speech you listen to. Now I am all for raising taxes since I pay very little income tax but to say this is going to help the poor is misleading at best and lying at worst. Anyone who does the math knows that there are too few rich and too many poor but there is one area where wealth distribution will work. It is the transfer of money from people who earn $50,000 to $75,000 per year to people who earn under $50,000. This is now going on in several states and others are jumping on the bandwagon. This occurs when states raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour for workers at places like McDonalds. Since there are large numbers of people in each of these groups the transfer of wealth will work. Where it does not work is the transfer of wealth from the top one percent to the 99 percent. If you took all the money that the top one percent earned and gave it to the rest of us, we would each get $5,500. The mistake that Senator Sanders is making is in talking about income tax. The very wealthy, the so called millionaires and billionaires pay very little income tax since most of their income comes from investments and not wages. Raising the income tax will affect corporate executives, professionals like lawyers and doctors and most of all, small business owners. These are the job creators and this would adversely affect the very people that Sanders purports to help. Instead of helping people by offering good jobs he will just send them some money that the government has collected in taxes from the job creators. The government does not create jobs. People always follow the populist campaigner who says he will take money from the rich and give it to the poor but every time this has been tried it fails. The latest attempt was Chavez in Venezuela. He was elected in 1998 on the promise of sharing the wealth and things went very well for about 10 years and then the economy fell apart. He had nationalized industries, most notably the oil business and used that money to help the poor but that came to an end when the money ran out. To quote Margaret Thatcher, “socialism is a great form of government until you run out of the other guys money”.