It’s noteworthy how some right-wing bloggers seem just as interested in the idea that the poor don’t work hard, as they are in the idea that the rich work really hard and ought not be “punished.” National Review’s Lisa Schiffren, who wrote an ode to the “professionals and entrepreneurs who make this country run,” had to add for good measure a dig at “the slackers, the entitled, the net tax consumers.”
This is actually a necessary part of the conservative “argument.” It makes little sense to complain about one class being “punished” when there is another class of people, as I suggested yesterday, who are even more “punished” despite their hard work, and who would stand to benefit from the “punishment” of the first group. Basically, the right needs people to believe in the myth of the welfare queen. Perhaps that explains why they got so worked up over a guy in a homeless shelter who took a picture of Michelle Obama with his cell phone.
In the saner precincts of the conservative blogosphere, it is recognized that poor people also work exceptionally hard. But this fact gets only a passing, parenthetical nod. The emphasis is still on the rich and how they are going to “respond rationally to incentives.” Count me among the skeptics of this supposed rationalism. The people who are “going Galt” are not responding rationally; they are responding emotionally and moralistically. As Slate’s Daniel Gross pointed out, someone who decreases his or her income from $320,000 to $250,000 will save only $2,100 in federal taxes. What sort of “rational” person throws away $70,000 in order to prevent a couple grand from going to the government?
Now, of course, at the margins, an increase in taxes might cause the rich to spend or work or hire slightly less. But it seems to me that this response is not caused by anything inherent in a tax increase from 36 to 39%. That is, if you were told one day, out of the blue and without a preceding political brouhaha, that your taxes were going up by that amount, I think that your “rational” response would be barely perceptible. You wouldn’t change much at all, if you changed anything.
The fact is, Obama is not trying to bleed the rich. He is raising their taxes back to where they were during the Clinton boom years. This Ayn Rand stuff is a huge, dare I say irrational, overreaction.