House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has released a video called ???Taxation Nation: Angelo???s Story,??? which offers the perspective of a fine old family business, Angelo???s Restaurant, on the way our bloated government and its tax demands are ruining local economies.
???This economy is just absolutely teetering,??? says Angelo???s current owner, Michael Passalacqua, ???and raising taxes on anybody at this particular time seems to me to be relatively foolish??? it???s just going to be tons of money dropped right out of the economy immediately.???
Passalacqua has an excellent appreciation for the interconnectedness of the private sector, and the opportunity cost of draining even more money into the Big Government sinkhole. Tax-raising politicians never want to discuss the opportunity cost of removing billions from the hands of private citizens ??? it???s all sunny promises of how wisely government will spend that money, without any thought spared for what individual citizens could have done with it. We are generally expected to think all that money would have sat idle in the vaults of rich fat cats, if the government didn???t seize and redistribute it.
That???s a stupid, twisted fantasy. You can chart its foolishness by watching our Gross Domestic Product stagnate. ???With the economy already at a near stand-still, the President???s proposed tax hike on American small businesses comes at the worst possible time for job creators,??? said Rep. McCarthy. ???Independent reports confirm that raising taxes on more than 900,000 small businesses threatens 710,000 jobs and would reduce economic output by 1.3 percent. It just doesn???t make any sense to punish American families and small businesses already struggling to make ends meet in this tough economy.???
Very little of America???s wealth is hoarded beneath a shroud of cobwebs. That money is spent and invested. The great question facing us is: who gets to do the spending and investing? The truth statists perpetually seek to obscure, as they patrol the exits from Taxation Nation, is that the people who earned that money are also much better at using it. The first step toward indenture is the concession that a great deal of your money ??? your time ??? is the rightful property of someone else.
