Taxes and Class Warfare

I thought of a few things today while reading comments about proposed tax cuts. Some people are for tax cuts, and some are for increased taxes on the wealthy. When discussing taxes, it's always good to keep in mind where the money is going.

When politicians promote tax cuts for the 'working' class, I'm always weary of these. That's because a lot of tax cuts aren't cuts at all, just tax credits. It's the government saying that they are 'letting' us keep more of our own money, as if it were their money to begin with. I thought that the government worked for the citizens, not the other way around.

The Obama administration has already made the case that we need to increase taxes on the wealthy because they need to pay their 'fair' share. I would totally agree with that statement. The wealthy should be treated no differently than any other wage earning American and pay their fair share. We should close tax loopholes to make sure that they wouldn't be able to take advantage of the system. At the same time though, in all fairness, shouldn't we also normalize their income tax rate as well so that it's more inline with their fellow citizens?

With all that said though, we need to keep in mind, even if we taxed the wealthy heavily, what exactly would that accomplish? It just ends up going into the hands of the government. The same government that bails out banks for hundreds of billions of dollars using tax payer money, gives aid to countries that have no direct impact on our lives, squanders money on wars overseas, and subsidizes companies that fail (like Solyndra). Let me break it down, we would be basically taking money from the rich, and giving it to... the rich?

Like always though the politicians promise to balance the budget and clean up the wasted federal spending. Every time I hear of a new government program from Obama, he says he's going to pay for it with spending cuts elsewhere, fixing loopholes, or ferreting out wasted spending. If it were so easy to do this, he should have done it already. Maybe it's just me, but I'm tired of giving the government the money I earn, and having them waste it on banks that make bad decisions, horrible companies like Solyndra, and bureaucracies that waste money. How about having the government fix the spending problem before we focus on the income problem.