RUSH: Mayor Bloomberg, state and city revenues in New York are falling because of the Wall Street collapse. State lawmakers are considering income tax increases for households earning between $250,000 and $1 million. They already pay a 6.85% income tax rate. Mayor Bloomberg, who as recently as six months ago would have supported this, had something different to say about it recently on the radio. It’s sound bite number 11.
BLOOMBERG: One percent of the people that live in the city, the households that file in the city pay something like 50% of the taxes. In a city that’s about 40,000 people so, you know, a handful left, any raise would make it revenue neutral. The question is, ‘What’s fair?’ If one percent are paying 50% of the taxes, you want to make it even more? A little over half the people, half the households who file tax returns don’t pay any taxes. And about 30% of the households that file get a credit from the government. The government sends them a check. That’s the Earned Income Tax Credit.
RUSH: Shazam! Shazam! Folks, I feel like the lid’s blowing today. But did you catch this? Forty thousand people in New York City are paying 50% of the taxes. Forty thousand people, and he’s worried that this state tax increase will force some of them to leave — and if they do, it will wipe out whatever new revenue is generated by a tax increase. Amazing!
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RUSH: There is doubt. There is disagreement. There is rage. There is effervescing anger all over this country to the Obama administration plans, and you would not know about it if your only source for news was the Drive-By Media. They are still the biggest cheerleaders that I have ever seen for an administration. But ladies and gentlemen, you have to hear Mayor Bloomberg again in New York, ’cause I want to put this in perspective for you. Here he is.
BLOOMBERG: One percent of the people that live in the city, the households that file in the city pay something like 50% of the taxes. In a city that’s about 40,000 people so, you know, a handful left, any raise would make it revenue neutral. The question is, ‘What’s fair?’ If one percent are paying 50% of the taxes, you want to make it even more? A little over half the people, half the households who file tax returns don’t pay any taxes. And about 30% of the households that file get a credit from the government. The government sends them a check. That’s the Earned Income Tax Credit.
RUSH: Now, let’s put this in perspective. New York City is the financial capital of the world, right? New York City is considered the hub of the United States of America, right? How many people live in New York? I mean 14 million people go to work every day, eight million people in New York City, right? That right? Do you understand what you just heard? Forty thousand — did he say people? He did. Forty thousand people (he means families, I’m sure, but 40,000 people) outta eight million pay half the tax load in the city. Do you realize all it would take to kill that city is half of them leaving? If 20,000 of that 40,000 paying 50% of all taxes fled and decamped, do you know what would happen to New York? It would die. These people, these 40,000 people, they ought to be treated like royalty.
They ought to be thanked. They ought to be respected. Instead, they are impugned. They are maligned. They are trashed, as often a day as Democrats can do so. They are said to be the problem. That 40,000 people is who Obama is aiming at. Those 40,000 people is who back home thinks are responsible for the blight that exists throughout the rest of the city. Those 40,000 people, they make too much money. They have too much of a good time. They have taken all that wealth from the other 50% of the city. As such, we have to target them: the stimulus package, the mortgage bailout, what Rick Santelli was talking about. Atlas Shrugged! The people who are making this country work are the targets, and the people who are the losers, the people who are the slackers, are the beneficiaries.
Forty thousand people, according to the mayor, provide over 50% of the revenue. Only now when revenue is down does anybody care about them. Only now when Wall Street has collapsed and tax revenues have gone down — and now Obama wants to put maximums on the amount people can earn on Wall Street. I would like to know how many of the 40,000 people in New York that provide all this are in the financial business, and how of those people’s caps on their pay will have a further effect on reducing tax revenues to the city. Now, the people that are doing this are not stupid. This is Bloomberg getting off the bus. This is Bloomberg getting off the Obama Air Force One. These people are not stupid. Don’t think that they’re just ignorant and socialist utopians who think they have better way.
They know exactly what they’re doing. That’s what’s scary about this. That’s what’s enraging about this. I listened to the most amazing thing. I wish I could remember where. I was watching television. It might have been… It was. It was Shepard Smith. And I think he was talking to one of the Fox Business News infobabes or anchors, I’m not sure which, and it was about the mortgage debacle and it was about the stimulus package, and Shepard Smith kept talking about the laws of economics. (summarized) ‘Well, you know, if we don’t do this, then that has to happen, and if we don’t do this, then that has to happen.’ I got to thinking, ‘The laws of economics? Whose laws of economics?’ Shepard Smith was talking about the laws of economics that are real, the ones that we know.
The economics of Friedrich Hayek, the economics of Milton Friedman, the economics of a free market, those are the economic rules or laws he was talking about; and it got me to thinking: Everybody knows these rules. Everybody knows the Law of Supply and Demand, for example. I mean, the people we’re talking about know it. Everybody knows that when you raise taxes, you decrease the activity that occurs on that activity that you have increased taxes on. When you lower taxes on an activity, that activity increases. So, for example, if you lower income taxes, entrepreneurs are gonna bust ass earning more income. They’ll pay less tax on it. If you lower capital gains taxes, people will be more incentivized to invest, because they’ll be able to keep more of the profit they earn.
You might say, ‘Well, there aren’t any profits right now.’ Well, there would be if we could re-incentivize people to invest again. But there’s no investment in the free market. All the investment is going in the government. Now, that’s ‘Keynesian,’ and it hasn’t worked. The government is — and, by the way, we’re not gonna go back for the longest time until this bunch is defeated in the next election or the next two elections, if that happens at all. We’re not going to go back to the free market economic rules that govern this country. What this is all about is replacing free market economics with government-centered central planning economics, picking of winners and losers. And that’s exactly what’s happening.
And right now the people being picked as winners are the people paying nothing, or very little of the tax bite that supports the government. The people who are being targeted as the losers are those of you who are playing by the rules, who can pay your mortgage, who did not go out and borrow more than you could afford. You’re paying your taxes. You’re doing what you can to support the institutions that govern where you live — the federal government, state government, city government, and so forth. You’re the targets now. We all are. We’re the victims. We have to pay. We have to pay for the unfair advantage our hard work has given us. We have to pay for the unfair advantage that our perhaps birthright gave us.
We have to pay for whatever reason they in Washington decide we have more than we should have, because the fact that we have more than we should have is denying others who are just as deserving less than what they should have. In the process, the welfare state is going to expand like crazy. Those currently in it are being subsidized to stay in it. Those not in it are gonna go broke, are going to be forced to go on unemployment. You lost half of your 401(k). I don’t know what’s happened to your kids’ college fund, but I dare say it’s probably not in great shape. You think this is an accident? You think the effort to ‘fix’ it is this dumb on purpose? Have you seen anything come out of Washington since Obama was inaugurated that is designed to help you, that is designed to get people outta your way so that you can once again start entrepreneuring, creating, inventing, investing?
It’s just the opposite, is it not? You think this is happenstance? You think this is really seriously honest people who really believe that supply-side economics….? Which, by the way, supply side, trickle down, whatever you call it? It’s free market economics is all it is, Basic Economic Rules 101, basic economic law. Basic economic law has been suspended and the people who practice it are practically under arrest. They’re in the process of being charged for their own version of immorality. Make no mistake: 40,000 people in New York pay over half the taxes — and Bloomberg knows that a tax increase on those people is going to cause some of them to leave, and they’re just going to get outraged and split. They ought to be treated like royalty.
They should be thanked; they should be respected. Normally if you run a business, you cater to your good customers. You want to keep them, and you want them to be happy and you want them to be happy paying you. The government of Barack Obama doesn’t even like you. The government of Barack Obama wants even more from you and they want you to be thankful to them that you’re paying it on the basis that you are helping Obama fix the economy. They want all accolades, all credit, all bowing down and kissing the feet to occur in Washington, at the feet of Barack Obama. He doesn’t even let members of Congress who wrote the stimulus Porkulus package surround him at the signing ceremony.
It’s all him. He did it by himself. He wants everybody to think that he’s the single, foremost driving force and authority that made it all happen. That’s what he’s cultivated, and he’s a pied piper. He’s got these people following him around like he’s Svengali, but this news out of New York, it’s not news to people like me; it’s not news to people like you. My website for four years has published federal data, what percentage of income taxpayers pay what percentage of the total load; and it’s similar to what it is in New York. It’s hard to leave the country, but you can leave a city and relocate. It’s happening in California. People are pulling out of there left and right, for a host of reasons, among them high taxes. If just 10,000 people left New York, if just 10,000 of these 50% left New York City, I shudder to think what would happen to the place.