The Thing About Umbrellas

Umbrellas, they say, are useful tools to have during rainy times because those umbrellas, they say, keep you dry. But do umbrellas really keep you dry? An inverted bowl of material roughly four feet in diameter hanging a few inches over your head is all you have between yourself and the rain.

When I have spent any time at all under an umbrella, I have still found myself mostly wet. Oh, the umbrella kept my head and shoulders and maybe even most of one arm dry. But the rest of my body was still open to the rain. Basically, from my mid-chest down to my feet were wet because the umbrella did not protect my entire body from the rain.

I remember when those clear plastic bubble umbrellas were a big fad. With those umbrellas, you could lower the bottom edge of the umbrella to just-below-shoulder level and still see. What was the purpose for designing the bubble umbrella? It was an attempt to rectify an innate flaw of the umbrella, a flaw that allowed most of your body to get wet. But even the bubble umbrella does not keep you dry in the rain. Sure, it will keep more of you dry than a standard umbrella, but it still doesn’t protect you from the waist down.

So why do we use umbrellas if they’re so bad? Because umbrellas do serve a purpose, and effectively so. In short durations, umbrellas help keep much of the water off us. A quick trip from the car to the front door of home or a business establishment is a good time to use an umbrella. In long durations, umbrellas keep water off our heads and, if the umbrellas are large enough and handled expertly (Go ahead and laugh at that over-extended use of the word “expertly;” I got a chuckle out of it.), our shoulders. And let’s face it, we are much more comfortable with our heads and shoulders dry and the rest of our bodies wet than we are with our heads and shoulders wet and the rest of our bodies dry. So, despite their inability to keep much of our bodies dry over any length of time, umbrellas are very useful.

Why Umbrellas?

“Why am I reading about the travails of umbrellas on a political blog?” I do have a reason for talking about umbrellas and that reason isn’t actually about umbrellas. If you consider the picture of a person as an image of a country, you will begin to understand. You can look at it as a scale from elite to common, rich to poor, connected to not-connected. Those who are at the top of the scale will stay dry while those from above-midpoint to bottom will get wet from the rain.

Now that I have developed this word-picture, what am I doing with the word-picture? It is to explain tax policy. For a great many years, “soak the rich” has been the class-envy cash cow of the liberals. It is classic redistribution policy. And yet, that policy has failed the communist states.

Anytime politicians have attempted to “soak the rich,” the rich have sheltered their money from the soaking. Want to increase the profits tax on the wealthy? They’ll just pull their money from their business investments and store it for better times. Want to sock it to corporations? They’ll just pass on the added tax to their customers. Increase the income tax on the big money-makers? They’ll shift their earnings to benefits packages or shift their earnings to later years. Add luxury taxes to yachts or private jets or high-dollar cars? They won’t buy them.

No matter how you try to use class-envy to “soak the rich,” the rich still have umbrellas. And the middle-class and the poor suffer for it. Let’s not forget the politicians who are doing the soaking are also protected from the downpour.

How do the rich umbrellas soak the poor and middle class? If the rich quit buying items that have luxury taxes, those items quit selling. If those items quit selling, the businesses quit building them. If the businesses quit building them, the workers – the poor and middle class – lose their jobs, and thus their incomes. Remember when the Democrats under the Clinton administration nearly single-handedly destroyed the yacht-manufacturing business with the luxury tax on yachts?

It is very important to understand corporations do not actually pay corporate tax. Oh, the records show they do, and the money coming out of corporations and going to government in the form of taxes say they do. But corporations don’t pay corporate tax, customers of those corporations do. When corporate taxes are increased, corporations pass on that tax to their customers who have to pay higher prices for goods to cover the higher tax. So those with less money pay more of their money for the same thing to make up for the added cost of doing business the government put on them. “Which ‘them’ is ‘them?’” When government increases corporate tax, it is an effort to increase the cost of doing business to the corporation. But in actuality the increased tax is an increased cost of doing business for the buyer and not the corporation.

Of course, when the corporation increases its prices, it loses buyers. Increase a price too much and a corporation will go bankrupt. But even without going bankrupt, a loss of business translates to a loss of employment need. A loss of employment need translates to more people out of work. You know, those middle-class and working poor?

When investors take money out of the stock market, businesses have less money for Research and Development, less money for expansion, less money for employee-base maintenance. And that means fewer jobs for the working class.

Countries who have used “class warfare” over any period of time have suffered for it. “Spread the wealth” countries, like Cuba, have depended on money from other countries to keep them propped up. USSR, with its spread the wealth ideology collapsed. China has begun to move from “spread the wealth” toward more of a free-market economy, and has begun a business and economic boom but is hurt by the lack of buyers for their goods in markets that are running toward government control.

At no time has socialism, big government, class envy ever improved the lot in life of the lower classes. Only by reducing government and allowing the market to act has any country experienced any true improvement in living standards of the populace. But we are fast becoming a nation of historical illiteracy, a nation of lazy sheep, seeking a shepherd to lead us ever which where he desires. Our jealousy, our envy, our arrogant ignorance has led us to this point and will lead us ever further into the quagmire unless something violently shakes us out of our lethargy.

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I wrote the above in January 2009, when next to nobody even knew about my blog. I’m reposting it now because Barack Obama and the Liberals are working the Socialist “class warfare” angle so feverishly, in an attempt to divide Americans and pit us one against another.

Well, the Obama Administration, ever needing to pit Americans against each other, rewrote the “poverty” guidelines to increase the number of so-called poor in America. As Mark Levin stated on his radio broadcast, it was written in such a way that if every living soul in America doubled their income (and nobody else in the world did), the number of “poor” Americans would stay exactly the same. It’s a wholly dishonest and dishonorable lying game Socialists must play if they want to succeed in destroying the American Dream and substituting the totally depraved and unworkable Socialist Sheol.

The Heritage Foundation has an excellent article that is well worth the read.

According to the columnist Robert J. Samuelson, the new Obama poverty measure “fails.” It flunks the test of “political neutrality,” and is based on “misleading statistics that not one American in 100,000 could possibly understand.”

That’s because the new calculation would measure poverty on a sliding scale. Thus, if the average income of families in the United States’ increases so too does the poverty threshold. Talk about keeping up with the Jones. This new measure provides the perfect climate for left-leaning politicians to promote equalization of wealth through redistribution. This new measure would bump poverty up 30 percent: more poverty equals more political fodder to argue for increased welfare.

As they say, read the rest of the article. The Truth about the American “poor” is that they are already orders of magnitude wealthier than most of the rest of the world. It is a Truth that cannot be denied without Dishonoring oneself.

For every four square feet that the average European has to live in, a poor American has five.

Watch the video to see how wealthy America’s “poor” actually are. Or, if you’re a class-warfare Socialist, ignore the video so you can continue with your lies in total ignorance. “The Truth shall set you free” unless you’re a radical Leftist wholly dependent on nobody learning the Truth; then the Truth shall destroy your agenda.

There are truly poor Americans who need a help up. But the number of truly poor Americans is far lower than what the old matrix showed, and far and away lower than what the Socialist Obama class-warfare matrix shows. The truly poor need a leg up. They’re not going to get that leg up from people who want to destroy the “rich”. Destroying the “rich” will only lead to greater poverty and greater power among the Socialist class (like Barack Obama and the Unions and the Democrat Party leadership).