More taxes for thee, but not for me

Here's one from The Wall Street Journal (free registration required to view article). I'll excerpt some of it here:

Liberal Loopholes
Edwards and Kerry want to raise taxes, but aren't wild about paying them.

In embracing John Edwards, John Kerry has also endorsed his populist "two Americas" rhetoric and has put tax increases at the center of the election campaign. So it's fair to ask the two Democrats: How much of those tax increases will actually hit the super-rich like yourselves, and how much will end up on the backs of upper middle-class wage earners?
...
Senator Edwards talks about the need to provide health care for all, but that didn't stop him from using a clever tax dodge to avoid paying $591,000 into the Medicare system. While making his fortune as a trial lawyer in 1995, he formed what is known as a "subchapter S" corporation, with himself as the sole shareholder.

Instead of taking his $26.9 million in earnings directly in the following four years, he paid himself a salary of $360,000 a year and took the rest as corporate dividends. Since salary is subject to 2.9% Medicare tax but dividends aren't, that meant he shielded more than 90% of his income. That's not necessarily illegal, but dodging such a large chunk of employment tax skates perilously close to the line.

The Internal Revenue Service takes a dim view of such operations and "may collapse the structure entirely and argue the S corporation is not truly a separate entity," in the words of Tax Adviser magazine. Attorney CPA magazine lists it as No. 11 of its "15 best underutilized tax loopholes," but warns that the IRS "has successfully litigated cases against individuals, particularly sole shareholders of personal service S corporations, reclassifying such deemed distributions as wages subject to social security taxes."
...
As a political matter, the dodge is especially hypocritical because the income limits on which Medicare taxes are paid were lifted by Democrats in 1993 specifically to hit "the rich," as Mr. Edwards likes to call people in his tax bracket. And the supreme irony? Mr. Edwards has claimed that he set up the subchapter S company to protect himself from legal liability. You know it's time for tort reform when even the trial lawyers say they're afraid of getting sued.

end excerpt

John Edwards is right. There are two Americas. There's the imaginary one that wealthy liberals think they live in, and the real one in which they kindly allow the rest of us to live.

Some how Democrats have managed to convince most Americans that they'd do a better job managing the economy. If one wants to know what the Democrat idea of doing a better job is, one need look no farther than the debacle that was California between the Republican administrations of Pete Wilson (1991-1999) and Arnold Schwarzenegger (2003 to present).

Part of California's woes stemmed from the collapse of the tech bubble that afflicted the entire nation, but they were made much worse by the mishandled energy crisis which saw one of the absolute wealthiest states in America going through rolling blackouts. Ridiculous taxes (many of which came from ballot initiatives voted on by the general public) drove businesses away in large numbers. These terrible things aren't quirks, but are a microcosm of the radical liberalism they would like to see America embrace. The kind of liberalism you see resulting in 10% unemployment in many European nations. Socialism gone wild has caused much of Europe to be left behind in the rapid recovery America is leading the rest of the world through.

Under Bush, we have seen spending increases (no surprise after 9/11, but still larger than we should have seen) and deficit increases (always needed when a Republican has to fix what the Democrats have screwed up). But with the help of the tax cuts we have overcome the bubble collapse, 9/11, anthrax, 2 wars, and corporate scandals to achieve the fastest growth in many years.

I hope people will consider these issues before voting for Kerry/Edwards. These guys want you to pay more taxes while they use loopholes, protecting most of their income from taxation.