Category archive: Wealth Redistribution

Taxpayers and Tax Spenders

By Chuck Roger • August 17th, 2011 12:00 am

By Chuck Rogér Let’s examine a stunning facet of human nature: When people get something free, they want more of that something even if it means hurting other people. A recent study conducted by the Mercatus Center finds that “when the tax-price of federally provided benefits is zero, people demand more, even when funded with [...]

The ‘Gimme Mine’ mentality and the American Spirit

By Chuck Roger • July 21st, 2011 12:00 am

Originally at American Thinker By Chuck Rogér No emotionally stable person viscerally likes inequality. Within both conservatives and liberals lives a strong distaste for what poverty does to people. Recognizing this universal revulsion, in The Quest for Cosmic Justice, Thomas Sowell wonders “why do… inequalities persist? Why are we not all united in our determination [...]

Dissecting progressive arrogance, Part V: Soaking the rich

By Chuck Roger • July 13th, 2011 12:00 am

The Clear Thinking blog is on hiatus and will return with new posts on July 18, 2011. Meanwhile, please enjoy this re-post of the “Dissecting progressive arrogance” series. More “Dissecting Progressive Arrogance” I, II, III, IV, VI, VII By Chuck Rogér Behold the progressive wise man who claims that confiscating rich people’s money is justified because [...]

Barack’s box of leeches

By Chuck Roger • June 28th, 2011 12:00 am

The Clear Thinking blog is on hiatus and will return with new posts on July 18, 2011. Meanwhile, here’s an oldie originally posted October 22, 2008. By Chuck Rogér Starry-eyed healers who drain blood to cure an ailing body don’t notice little side-effects—like the death of the patient. On securing the Democrat nomination, Barack Obama [...]

Barack Obama: son of promise, child of hope

By Chuck Roger • June 27th, 2011 12:00 am

The Clear Thinking blog is on hiatus and will return with new posts on July 18, 2011. Meanwhile, here’s an oldie originally posted August 13, 2008. By Chuck Rogér That’s the title of a children’s book about a boy who “knew he wasn’t quite like anybody else” and decided that he was meant to “bring [...]

7 hang-ups of highly effective liberals

By Chuck Roger • June 23rd, 2011 12:00 am

The Clear Thinking blog is on hiatus and will return with new posts on July 18, 2011. Meanwhile, here’s an oldie originally posted July 16, 2008. By Chuck Rogér The modern-day sociopolitical term, “progressive,” describes that which comforts people while defying rationality. “Progressives” are the elite, bristling with ideas on how to run government and [...]

Will Conservatives Embrace Paul Ryan’s Call to End Corporate Welfare?

By Chuck Roger • May 4th, 2011 12:00 am

Originally in American Thinker, May 3, 2011 By Chuck Rogér Wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass power. Corn ethanol, embryonic stem cell research, electric and hybrid vehicle development, and “green” technology in general. Education. All are enterprises with highly-criticized government subsidies. And the vast majority of the criticism comes from conservatives But what of oil, gas, [...]

Of Joseph Stiglitz, by Joseph Stiglitz, for Joseph Stiglitz

By Chuck Roger • April 19th, 2011 12:00 am

Originally titled “The Spreading of Economic Fallacy” in American Thinker, April 15, 2011 By Chuck Rogér The world of academia provides a comfy home to progressives. And when one of the critters writes in Vanity Fair magazine, gems of “thought” tend to emerge. In a new Vanity Fair article, “Of the 1%, by the 1%, [...]

Progressive Fallacy Number 667: Wealth Redistribution Creates Societal ‘Harmony’

By Chuck Roger • April 4th, 2011 12:00 am

Originally in American Thinker, March 30, 2011 By Chuck Rogér Is wealth envy a serious problem in a technologically advanced country like America?  Economist Tyler Cowen observes that economic indignation is mostly felt toward: …the guy down the hall who got a bigger raise … [or toward] the husband of your wife’s sister, because the [...]

‘The poor are getting poorer’ is a baseless claim

By Chuck Roger • February 4th, 2011 12:30 am

In the United States, people who contend that the rich are growing richer at the expense of the poor don’t have reality on their side. To accept the claim, one must believe in a finite-sized pot of wealth from which everyone is supposed to be allocated a “fair share.” But a simple thought experiment reveals [...]

A thought experiment on the ‘income gap’

By Chuck Roger • January 18th, 2011 12:30 am

Wealthy people must be punished–presumably for accumulating all that nasty “wealth.” At least this is the impression one gets from today’s class warfare mongering progressives, who talk of the evils of the “income gap.” Free To Choose Network director Max Borders suggests the following approach to kicking off a discussion with an income gap worrier. Whenever [...]

Did President Obama just sign his own pink slip?

By Chuck Roger • December 20th, 2010 5:38 am

Or is the President’s reversal on tax policy merely a blip on the road to his 2012 reelection? Barack Obama campaigned on a promise to “spread the wealth around.” The spreading, he preached, would be “good for everybody.” Obama supported and was supported by the Working Families Party, which believes in “making the wealthy pay [...]

Will British-style income ‘fairness’ come to America?

By Chuck Roger • December 6th, 2010 6:36 am

The opening line of a recent Financial Times commentary warns of the utter nonsense that is to follow: “Fairness is on everyone’s lips.” No, actually “fairness” is on very few people’s lips. But nonchalant presumptiveness comes natural to progressives. To these creatures, everyone should think as they do, want what they want, or act as [...]

The positive power of ‘income inequality’

By Chuck Roger • November 17th, 2010 1:51 am

Income inequality is critical to everyone’s prosperity. Too much sameness would be a really bad thing. Why? Facts from U.S. Census Bureau’s 2009 database on household income distribution: There are more than 4X the number of earners per household in the top fifth compared to bottom fifth. More than 3X the percentage of married couples [...]

Dissecting progressive arrogance, Part V: Soaking the rich

By Chuck Roger • November 9th, 2010 2:08 am

More “Dissecting Progressive Arrogance” I, II, III, IV, VI, VII Behold the progressive wise man who claims that confiscating rich people’s money is justified because rich people gather wealth through “the power of luck” and “owe” a “debt” to “society.” For insight into this dumb argument, I reproduce here for your amusement a chunk of a [...]

How much does it take to be ‘rich,’ and why is anyone even asking?

By Chuck Roger • October 11th, 2010 2:27 am

Should government steal a higher percentage of income from “rich” people than from less-wealthy taxpayers? The New York Times discusses the “more basic matter of fairness, whether a person who earns more than $200,000 a year should be taxed at rates similar to those who make $5 million.” The implication is that it would be [...]

Barack Obama’s Desperate Search

By Chuck Roger • October 4th, 2010 12:30 am

In the beginning, Barack Obama assigned himself the mission of saving people that he saw as beaten down by capitalism and the modern world. Method was obvious to Obama. Americans must be pitted against one another, preferably along lines of race and class. The wealthy must be portrayed as villains who gather riches for the [...]

Government-run, taxpayer-funded, anti-poverty programs do not work

By Chuck Roger • September 28th, 2010 2:39 am

Trying to “lift” people from poverty does… not… work — ever, period. Quick assignment: Study the following table and graph from a June 2010 Heritage Foundation report by Brian Riedl, and then keep reading below. Click on chart/graph for larger view. Notice what the title of the table points out. With 2010 “anti-poverty spending” at [...]

Paul Krugman proves that the Nobel Prize is no measure of intelligence

By Chuck Roger • September 3rd, 2010 3:04 am

Does receiving the Nobel Prize in economics cause cognitive disorders or dishonesty? Or conversely, does eligibility for the Prize require that a candidate already be cognitively or morally challenged?  New York Times op-ed economist and Nobel laureate, Paul Krugman, recently accused Republicans and conservative Democrats of refusing to “help an ailing economy.” As evidence of [...]

A picture of government stealing quality of life

By Chuck Roger • September 2nd, 2010 3:06 am

The age-old argument put forth by big-government enthusiasts to justify transferring wealth from the people to state is that central planning geniuses can dispense the wealth to improve the lives of people whose lives need improving. Please study the following graph for a minute.  Click on graph for a larger, more readable view. Lefties use [...]

Gloomy Progressive’s Prescription for Eliminating the Middle Class

By Chuck Roger • August 25th, 2010 3:01 am

Originally in American Thinker, August 24, 2010. Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich is a progressive. On the Huffington Post, Reich — now a U.C. Berkeley public policy professor — proclaims that America’s middle class has been in “decline.” The professor writes that since the 1980s, “the economy has made the rich far richer without [...]

Sunrise in America

By Chuck Roger • August 18th, 2010 3:01 am

The American people have trusted tyrants. In 2008, Democrats campaigned on promises to change the way Washington conducts business. But now amid the worst economic times since the Great Depression, the tyrants are indulging a job-killing ideology in a war of wills against us, the people. The government of the people has betrayed the people. [...]

Watch as unemployment eats map of United States

By Chuck Roger • August 17th, 2010 3:30 am

Short and not so sweet today. Here’s an animation of how unemployment has consumed America since the start of the recession. The darker the color, the higher the unemployment. If you’re having trouble seeing what’s happening in the small window, you can go here for a larger view, The rate of unemployment skyrockets fastest on the [...]

The liberal thought process: How will the ‘arts’ get ‘funded’?

By Chuck Roger • August 16th, 2010 3:30 am

We work; we produce; people value what we produce and pay us to continue producing. Whether the fruits of our production be things or services, the process, known as “supply and demand,” makes sense to 80% of Americans–at least 80% of Americans who have income and pay taxes. But polls find one-fifth of Americans calling [...]

Throw the Bums Out and Watch the New Bums Very, Very Closely

By Chuck Roger • August 11th, 2010 3:05 am

The Obama Presidency crowned a century of progressivism that drove America far away from traditional social and economic values. So far away that Obama was elected partly because of promises to fundamentally transform America and redistribute wealth. But wealth redistribution is merely a tool for achieving another end. Even reality-ignoring progressives comprehend that no society [...]

Go west and south, but not too far west, to find freedom from oppressive taxation

By Chuck Roger • July 1st, 2010 8:51 pm

Earlier this week, we looked at something called the Moocher Index and learned that the willingness of people who don’t need financial aid to accept aid anyway is concentrated on both coasts of the United States but is particularly strong in the Northeast. Curiously, the states who have the most unfriendly tax structures also lie [...]

Go west, but not too far west, to find self-reliance

By Chuck Roger • June 29th, 2010 8:52 pm

The graph below was plotted by Cato Institute’s Dan Mitchell from data assembled by the Center for Immigration Studies. The horizontal axis represents the percentage of non-poor residents of each state signed up for government assistance–in other words, income redistribution programs. Mitchell calls the measure the Moocher Index. Really study the graph. Allow me to [...]

Obama’s redistribution of wealth… to big business

By Chuck Roger • May 13th, 2010 9:29 pm

In a recent Pajamas Media post, Victor Davis Hanson offered keen insight on the real effects of Obamanomics. I went to two banks the other day. The interest rates on interest checking, or short-term savings, or money market accounts (without tying money up for a half year or so) were all below 1%. In my [...]

Barack Obama: Fairness Monger-in-Chief

By Chuck Roger • May 3rd, 2010 9:36 pm

October 14, 2008, Senator Barack Obama speaking to Joe the Plumber: “…I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” April 28, 2010, President Barack Obama speaking to an Illinois audience: “I mean, I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.” Investor’s Business Daily observes: It takes a certain [...]

Ramming headlong into economic ruin–intentionally and for no good reason

By Chuck Roger • April 30th, 2010 9:35 pm

Behold the thinking of a know-it-all progressive zealot: Trade can be green, and world trade rules can be tools to make it so. Here we have the quintessential progressive, James Bacchus, former member of Congress from Florida and former chairman of the Appellate Body of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Bacchus also chairs his law [...]

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