By John F. Di Leo -
The top marginal federal income tax rate in the United States – for businesses and for people who file as businesses – is 39.6%.
As a result, businesses do not grow as they should. Businesses do not thrive as they should. Businesses do not produce, or invent, or add on, or hire, as they would if their tax burden were lower.
International corporations therefore find that they must do more and more of their manufacturing abroad, where their profits are not so severely penalized. And domestic corporations do not prosper… and would-be entrepreneurs do not start-up new enterprises here, because in the United States, today, success itself is penalized.
And people are protesting … the presence of statues in public parks.
The United States had the greatest health care system on earth until seven years ago. Virtually every American citizen either received decent insurance from his employer, or bought decent insurance on his own, or received decent insurance from the company he retired from… or received decent coverage from Medicare.
There were shortcomings; VA coverage was often poor for our veterans, and the poor often got poor coverage through Medicaid, but these matters could have been focused upon, and improved…
…until a radical presidency illegally forced a particularly incompetent version of socialized medicine – and yes, that takes some doing – upon the country. Today, the healthcare funding system is a monstrosity, because the Obama administration’s approach has impoverished millions, with expensive but useless mandatory plans.
And people are protesting … the presence of statues in public parks.
The nation is suffering a crime wave. Gangs continue to take over our major cities, because even as police risk their lives to catch and prosecute the drug dealers, gang leaders, and pimps who rule the streets, the criminal justice system is so skewed in favor of the criminal that we let them go… or we plea-bargain them down to charges that don’t carry jail time, so we put even the convicted ones back on the street anyway.
Besides, no matter how many criminals we do manage to put behind bars, decades of porous borders have allowed a rapid replenishment system. For every gang member we take out of commission, another one arrives from their home base, south of the border, to take his place. MS-13, Sinaloa, the Gulf Cartel… so many criminal organizations from all over the world have directed their operatives to our big cities, and the suicidal Sanctuary City provisions of those cities act like magnets to draw them in, turning our cities into banana republics.
And people are protesting … the presence of statues in public parks.
Cities, counties and states raise their tax burdens, in income taxes, beverage taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, gas taxes… and these increased taxes have the exact result that every economist has always said they would have:
They drive down property values, depress economic activity, leave people with less discretionary income. This hurts every business that taxpayers would normally frequent – the mall, the restaurant, the theater, the nightclub, the bookstore.
If you have less to spend, you spend less, it’s as simple as that. So, every business suffers.
And when businesses suffer, employment suffers.
The cashiers, baggers, stockboys, waiters, cooks – everyone who works in any kind of retail environment, or the wholesale industries that support them, will see his hours get cut.
Did the levels of government that hiked these taxes intend to drive their constituents out of work? Did they intend to be destructive to the lives of their neighbors? Perhaps not. but the effect is the same, regardless of the intent: people lose their jobs, people lose their businesses; neighborhoods wither and die, commercial districts no more.
And people are protesting … the presence of statues in public parks.
Now, is this to say that there’s nothing to protest about them, at all?
Not necessarily. These big bronze statues in public parks may represent slaveowners, merchants, politicians, generals… the Civil War figures commemorated in this manner do raise questions. Should these statues be brought indoors and displayed in a Civil War museum – rather than left outdoors as if all and sundry shared their respect for the Confederate side in the late unpleasantness? Good questions, valid questions, worthy of debate and decision, in a rational manner…
But the crowds have gone beyond the Civil War, muddying that reasonable argument, haven’t they?
Within days of Charlottesville, the agitators were calling for the removal of statues that pre-date the Civil War, even our nation’s greatest heroes. We have seen calls for the removal of statues of Founding Fathers like Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, and of our first president, George Washington, the marvelous leader who united the nation to rise up against England.
Yes, many of our Founders inherited plantations in the age of slavery, but many had such other incredibly redeeming qualities that we cannot judge them entirely on the fact that they happened to live in a time and place that included this particular flaw.
So random has this violence become, just days after the August conflicts in Charlottesville, VA, the city of Chicago even saw a statue of Abraham Lincoln torched. How? And why? What crazed mind could possibly apply a moral equivalence to both the Confederacy and the man who stood against them and vowed that the United States would be one single country again, reborn free of the practice of plantation slavery?
There is no logic in it, because logic was never intended to apply in the first place.
This whole popular crisis is a distraction, concocted by the deep pockets of the Left. George Soros’ unlimited bank account funds the CraigsList ads that bring rent-a-protester armies by the busload from states away, ready-made clubs and posters in hand.
Permits or not, sensible reason or not, the goal of MoveOn, Antifa, Occupy and the rest is really to dominate the headlines, to pull our nation’s legitimate issues off the front page so that they get no traction in the Capital.
How can politicians focus the country on the tax cuts we so desperately need, for example – issues that require a bit of explanation to win support – if every time a politician opens his mouth, the press shouts the question “And where do YOU stand on the removal of statues?”
We have so much to do, from tax cuts to an obamacare repeal, from a crackdown on illegal aliens to a renewed war on the drugs that infest our big cities, our small towns, and everything in between.
But we cannot do it – we cannot build a national argument for such improvements – as long as the public is preoccupied with hundred year old statues of two hundred year old men.
And that is the true crisis: not the question of what to do about statues, but the question of how to put an end to that distraction, and focus the country on the things that we know really matter to our nation’s future.
Frankly, the only thing in the news today that really merits a wrecking ball is the whole corrupt distraction itself.
Copyright 2017 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer, actor and writer. His columns have appeared in Illinois Review since 2009. Permission is hereby granted to forward freely, provided it is uncut and the IR URL and byline are included.
