I’m still not getting your point. You initially objected to classifying people with an AGI of $200,000 as rich on the grounds that their money is not discretionary. What you have presented is a set of difficulties faced by someone wanting to start up a farm. But that does not make their profit non-discretionary. They are choosing to start up a farm. No one has the inalienable right to start up a farm. They have the right to try. Of course if we make it too difficult then no one will do it and we will have wasted farmland and higher food prices or food shortages, and I agree that is not good. I suppose that is why we have farm subsidies. But I would not put the need to repay a huge capital investment loan on the same level as the need to buy essentials for today. The difficulty of doing something should be correlated with the potential payoff. Someone paying for day-to-day essentials only gets to live another day. Someone successfully buying and developing a profitable farm ends up with a lot more than he started with - in addition to getting to live another day. That big payoff should be associated with some added degree of difficulty in getting it. Sure, it would be nice if we could make life easy for everyone. But we don’t have the resources to do that. So everyone has to bear their share of the difficulty. If you want to lessen the burden on farmers and small business, then you have to identify who will bear that share of the burden that you are lifting from the farmers.
I relaize that to some, another’s acquisition of assets, even if hard-won and over a lifetime, is somehow undeserved even if the public benefits by his doing so. I also realize there are those to whom “income” is “income”, no matter whether it’s invested productively or squandered on luxuries. In both cases, it apparently seems a source of revenue, with which to do whatever politicians want to do with it, so it’s profitable to them to incite uncomprehending envy.
Never mind that a farmer might make $300,000 this year and nothing at all the next year. (How much do you think farmers and ranchers in the southern plains made in 2011?) Never mind that a small businessman might do the same. The government wants people to think of that income as a resource to be tapped, never mind that in tapping it, the enterprise is hampered or destroyed, with negative results for the public generally. Unfortunately, in the case of small business people, they are the ones who create most jobs, and the precise reason why they have not for these three years is that they have hanging over them the promise of increased taxes and regulation.
And, of course, the assumption that somehow destroying the productive infrastructure by looting it will pay someone else’s “essentials” is without foundation and, in my view, without merit. If you knew anybody who really and truly is intractably poor, not just whiney, you would realize that this government has not benefitted them in the least way notwithstanding the enormous debt it has incurred in order to benefit its own political donors.
History is replete with examples of rulers who “looted the infrastructure” for short-term gain. It never turns out well for anyone other than the ruling clique, and not forever even for them. So it has been in the period of total Democrat power.
It might be enlightening to sometime read the Social Encyclicals. The individual and family acquisition of productive and inheritable assets is something the Popes have supported unequivocally since Pope Leo XIII. Over-reliance on big business and big government for wages and benefits has been condemned as a social evil. And yet, there are many in this country who would readily make it difficult or impossible for people to acquire their own means of support.
And if you think food is expensive now, wait until late 2012. It’s a common mistake to believe that somehow all food is subsidized by the government. It might come to that, as private producers are crushed by a government that sees them as kulaks. But the reality is that other than grains cotton and tobacco (the latter of which somehow this administration continues to subsidize) not very much is actually subsidized. It might be mentioned that recently, market prices have outstripped subsidy guarantees in many cases anyway. A good part of that is due to the increasing worldwide demand for quality food. But, okay, better to make food even more expensive in this country so it can afford to loan billions to Brazil to benefit George Soros and throw money at bogus green energy projects operated by political donors.
Finally, you asked who should bear the burden that I propose not to impose on farmers and small business people. How about imposing it on no one? How about not burdening the public with new spending programs at all?
It sometimes achieves publicity, but in the long-term it achieves ignominy and far more negativity for the taxpayer (credit reports, employment consequences, possible loss of personal freedom) than for the institution (gov’t agency).
