Dim Won, b/k/a Barack Obama has talked of solving problems by waving his magic pen. Yet Joe the Plumbers pipe wrench is capable of doing something that Dim Won’s magic pen can not do, to wit create wealth. A Mickey D burger flipper is no more valuable after Dim Won were to wave his magic pen to decree that the bugger flipper flip for fifteen dollars an hour. On the flip side, your drain is much more valuable when it drains as when it is clogged.
[1]Hat tip: Daniel J. Mitchell
Sam Pizzigati wonders why we just all can’t earn the same, Useless Toady [2]:
Only 7% of Americans, Gallup reports, currently feel “very satisfied” with our nation’s distribution of income and wealth. Only 26%, adds the latest USA TODAY/Pew Research Center Poll, feel that the government should do “not much” or “nothing” to reduce the gap between the rich and everyone else.
Out beyond the Beltway, in other words, we have overwhelming public support for taking meaningful action against inequality. Yet we’re more likely to see sunshine and 70 degrees at the Super Bowl this Sunday than have America, by the end of this year, headed in a significantly more equal direction.
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Another test: Fast-food workers are pushing for a $15 hourly minimum wage. If the federal minimum had risen since the 1960s as fast as the incomes of the top 1%, that minimum today would exceed $22.
An 80% top tax rate, a $15 minimum wage. Simple steps. Let’s take them.
Thomas Sowell meanwhile points out that not all doing is equally valuable, Real Clear Politics [3]:
One of the problems with so many discussions of income and wealth is that the intelligentsia are so obsessed with the money that people receive that they give little or no attention to what causes money to be paid to them, in the first place.
The money itself is not wealth. Otherwise the government could make us all rich just by printing m, Raore of it. From the standpoint of a society as a whole, money is just an artificial device to give us incentives to produce real things — goods and services.
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Intellectuals’ obsession with income statistics — calling envy “social justice” — ignores vast differences in productivity that are far more fundamental to everyone’s well-being. Killing the goose that lays the golden egg has ruined many economies.
The liberal apparent obsession with income inequality is just their latest distraction. If Dim Won wants to boost the economy, with the mere stroke of a pen, all he need do is to approve the completion of the Keystone Pipeline. Increasing Bill Gates taxes will not put more gas in your car. Bringing the price of gasoline down will.