The conservative blogs are afire with Ayn Rand love. Apparently, by raising the top marginal tax rate back to where it was in the Clinton years, President Obama is “punishing” the most productive members of society.
Au contraire. Here is my idea of “punishment.” You take a person who was born into poverty, who was born without highly marketable skills, who lost out in the genetic and social lottery. Then you send him to rotten schools, with limited access to health care, with no security and therefore no freedom to take risks. And then you call him and others like him “the slackers, the entitled, the net tax consumers.” To me, that’s punishment.
But, hey, that’s just my own sense of fairness. You might also be interested to know that the empirical evidence is on the side of angels: higher tax rates don’t necessarily reduce productivity.
But some conservatives are trying to demonstrate the connection between high taxes and low productivity by causing it, that is, by inducing lots of people to “go Galt.” In other words, they’re trying to get people to punish themselves and punish society at the same time.