Friday night at the neighbor’s for a small dinner-party.
Lesson learned: If they would only really think things through to their logical conclusions, liberals, too, could be smart.
For example, it seems liberals agree with a flat tax system like the one George Bush touts, rather than the punishing “progressive” tax system that successful and hard-working and innovative people hate and layabouts and n’er-do-wells and socialists and liberals love.
But they just don’t know it yet.
The story, as told by our gracious dinner-party host, is that Joan, who operates a retail store of some kind, had to move to a new mall location because the rents went up at her old location. That in itself is a horrendous abuse by the big bad dirty greedy (and hopefully American!) capitalist mall-owner, apparently.
The story-teller then lamented at the fact that the mall had a policy wherein after a store—a tenant—reaches a certain sales revenue level, the store has to start paying the mall owner a percentage of their sales revenue.
The audience of dinner guests that was assembled around the dining room table all gasped.
It’s a common condition of any retail space lease—across most every mall in North America—to charge a percentage of sales revenue in addition to basic rent. The gasping of the audience just shows a lack of knowledge amongst the audience about how a simple, grass-roots, common run-of-the-mill small retail business works. But it shows more too.
One indignant dinner guest just couldn’t hold back her disgust at what she perceived as a horrible injustice. She lamented about how it’s just simply “dirty pool” to do that, and how it just doesn’t make any sense. It’s stupid. Crazy.
Why didn’t it make sense? Because, she proffered, it’s a disincentive to the poor store owner who’s just trying to make a living. The more you make, the harder you work, the more successful you are, the more you pay out of your till? Scandalous! Ridiculous!
The words “income tax” were itching to come out of my all-knowing mouth, but if I’d laid that egg on her and the crowd, it probably would have caused one of those embarrassing periods of shocked silence lasting at least three seconds. That plus the fact that I’d consumed lots of their great home-made red wine convinced me to instead bite my tongue and simply ponder in amazement how she and everyone else seemed to have missed the salient point swimming around in my inebriated mind. And how they constantly miss that point every single day of their lives.
Our progressive income tax system is worse—far worse—than what is effectively a ‘flat tax system’ at the mall. Every tenant at the mall, after a certain income level, pays the same fixed percentage of ‘tax’. On the other hand, with our “progressive” income tax system, that is compounded to absurdity. The more you make, the bigger the percentage of your income that you pay in taxes—up to nearly half of your income. It’s a thousand times worse. And don’t forget, retail businesses all pay that progressive income tax to the government on top of their rent and percentage of sales to the mall owner!
“Dirty pool” she said, in describing what she completely misunderstands. Something that a mall-owner (read: CAPITALIST) does is despicable, but your own government doing a far greater injustice is: JUST FINE.
Yet these same people will no doubt go on, later in the evening or throughout their daily lives, discussing how the rich don’t pay their fair share (tho’ they don’t have the foggiest clue what share they do pay); ‘the man’ keeps them down; They’re just a poor woman so therefore they can’t get ahead; and other such clichÃ
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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