Mark Steyn on Joe the Plumber

Mark Steyn has a column up at National Review Online entitled "Joe the Plumber vs. Joe the Hair-Plugger", which is both very serious and very funny (but you expect that with Steyn, don't you?) at the same time.

"Supposedly, under the Obama tax plan, 95 per cent of the American people will get a tax cut. You’d think that at this point the natural skepticism of any sentient being other than six-week-old puppies might kick in, but apparently not. If you’re wondering why Obama didn’t simply announce that under his plan 112 per cent of the American people will get a tax cut, well, they ran it past the focus groups who said that that was all very generous but they’d really like it if he could find a way to stick it to Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Karl Rove and whatnot. So 95 per cent it is..........

.........Anyway, our Fact Check Unit ran the numbers on the Obama tax-cut plan and the number is correct: “95.” It’s the words “per cent” immediately following that are wrong: that’s a typing error accidentally left in from the first draft. It should read: Under the Obama plan, 95 of the American people will get a tax cut."

0bama's mathematically impossible tax plan should worry everyone. When 45% of the populace pay no taxes, it is not possible to give 95% a tax cut. So how does 0bama propose to pull this off? Refundable tax credits is the Doublespeak du jour mechanism he is proposing. This is just another word for welfare. You can't "refund" anything to someone who never paid anything in the first place. If they're getting a check from the Treasury, that money had to be confiscated from someone else. That someone else is probably a business owner who now won't have that money available to invest in growing his business and giving someone else the opportunity to earn some of that money. When 70% of the existing jobs in this country are provided by small businesses and 80% of the new ones, taking this money out of the productive economy and redistributing it to people who had no hand in producing it is not only insane but fundamentally wrong. Increasing tax rates will also act to decrease GDP which will decrease tax revenues. The next time you hear some smug nit-wit going on about how it's stupid to reduce tax rates when you are running a deficit, point them to that (and pray their math and reading comprehension skills are on a par with a 9th grader's).