exposing @Stopbeck's economic illiteracy

@stopbeck recently tweeted  

Some folks keep saying that raising taxes doesn't increase revenue. Look, this isn't political, it's math. M'kay?


We conservatives tire of his liberal simplistic thinking on economic issues.   We are tired of Democrats like him saying that the poor are the "working class"  when in many cases the rich are some of the hardest working people in our society.    Here is a little bit of Thomas Sowell common sense to show you just how stupid @stopbeck is.

Tax rates are meant to make an ideological statement and promote class-warfare politics, not just bring in revenue.

There has been much indignation on the left over the recent news that General Electric paid no taxes, despite its large amounts of profit. But another way of looking at this is that high tax rates on paper do not mean high tax revenues for the government.

The liberal answer to budget deficits is almost always to raise tax rates on "the rich," in order to bring in more revenue. The fact that higher tax rates have often brought in less revenue than before is simply ignored.

Our corporate tax rates are higher than in many other countries. That may have something to do with the fact that many American corporations (including General Electric) expand their operations in many other countries, providing jobs-- and tax revenues-- in those other countries.

But high-tax ideologues don't see it that way. They would be horrified at the idea that we ought to lower our corporate tax rates, just so that more American businesses would do more of their business at home, providing more Americans with much-needed jobs.

To ideologues, that is just a cop-out from the class-warfare battle. It is far more important to them to score their political points against "the rich" or "Wall Street" than that a few million more Americans out of work would be able to find jobs.

The idealism of the left is a very selfish idealism. In their war against "the rich" and big business, they don't care how much collateral damage there is to workers who end up unemployed.

It so happens that many-- if not most-- of those called "the rich" are not rich and many, if not most, of those called "the poor" are not poor. They are people who happen to be in a particular part of the income stream as of a given moment in their lives when statistics are collected.

Internal Revenue Service data show that the income of people who were in the lowest income tax bracket in 1996 rose by 91 percent by 2005. But people in the "top one percent" had their incomes drop by 26 percent in those same years.

There is nothing complicated about this. Most people simply start at the bottom when they are young and their pay rises as they get more experience. Most people in the top one percent are there for only a single year when they happen to have a spike in income. They too are not an enduring class.

The time is long overdue to start thinking about taxes as sources of revenue, not as ways of making political statements.

 http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2011/04/13/taxes_and_politics/page/full/