Big Red Car here. Early today in the ATX but already you can tell it’s going to be a great day. Every day in the ATX is great.
On Earth as it is in Texas.
Wealth is a good thing
Wealth is a good thing. It allows you to live well. It allows you to convert your dreams into reality. It provides opportunity for your family, your children. It allows you to fund noble causes. It allows you to live the Amercan Dream.
Wealth is prosperity, fortune, means, substance, affluence, property and a store of value. This notion of a store of value is critical in getting one’s mind around wealth as is the concept of wealth being property. Your property. You own it.
Wealth is the conversion of your labor into something of financial value which you can then invest to create more value and more wealth. It is both a beginning and an end.
You get wealthy by working hard and it is available to anyone willing to pay that price.
Get a job. Come to work early. Stay late. Work hard. Save your money. Invest your money. Build your personal wealth. Let it grow. Harness the power of compound interest.
Wealth is a duty
To create wealth is a duty in much the same way one who has been given great natural talents or gifts is responsible to ensure they are not squandered.
For some folks, the ability to create wealth is their talent. What they do with it — perhaps fund noble causes, send their children to great universities, fund their own talents — is the result of harnessing that talent.
Nobody should be embarrassed they are good at creating wealth. Some should be beaten like a rented mule for what they have done with it.
When The Boss works with his brilliant young CEOs, entrepreneurs, founders sometimes they are reluctant to include in their Vision for their new enterprise the desire to create wealth. They articulate the unsolved problem of the world they intend to slay, they invoke the balm they intend to put on the world’s pain points but they fail to say they want to become wealthy in the process.
Stop it. It is OK to want to get rich and do good things with your riches.
The war on wealth
Today there is a war on wealth which follows the meme that wealth is an accident and that folks who have worked to create their wealth are somehow “luckier” and therefore should be embarrassed by their success. In their minds, it is a tax on luck. Odd notion, really.
Our President contributes to this daily and infamously when he suggested small businessmen “…did not make this…”. Silly goose.
Sayeth the Big Red Care: Nonsense!
Further sayeth the Big Red Car: Bullshit!
The liberal left wants to confiscate and redistribute not just a successful person’s income, they want to confiscate and redistribute successful people’s wealth. The terms “war on wealth” and “tax on success” are different pews in the same church praying to the same god of penalizing outcomes. Good outcomes.
Remember that wealth is after tax money. You’ve paid taxes on it once just to create it. Now the liberal left wants to tax it yet again because it’s just sitting around making you wealthier still. They have nothing good to do with it, they just want to confiscate and redistribute it. They want to control it. They want to control you.
This is the essence of the war on wealth. The notion that your wealth — after tax value — should be taxed again, again, again and again.
It is not enough for the liberal left to tax your gains on wealth, capital gains tax ya’ll, they want to tax it for just sleeping in your bed. For just hanging out with you.
This is also the essence of the estate or inheritance taxes — the liberal left has successfully made dying and the transfer of your wealth to your heirs a taxable event. This is, after all, just property. Why can’t you do with your property after you die what you could have done with when you were alive?
The war on wealth includes confiscatory taxes on income, taxes on capital when you invest your after tax income, taxes on your estate when you die. To this the liberal left wants to add a tax on your wealth and property while you are alive.
Economic impact
So, Big Red Car, what does this all mean?
Simply put, the US economy is an economy driven by the desire to create wealth. We are capitalists. We want to be paid for labor and when we marry labor with capital, risk capital, we want to be able to create wealth.
If you want to create jobs, you have to embrace the idea someone is going to get rich in the process.
If you are making war on wealth, you have to get comfortable with the idea no jobs will be created as you have created a disincentive for job creation.
If you create an atmosphere in which entrepreneurial vigor is rewarded, you will unleash the power of the American entrepreneur. It is after small business which is the real engine of growth, economic expansion and job creation. If you want to choke entrepreneurial vigor to death because someone is getting rich in the process, guess what? No jobs.
Think this is baloney?
Consider the case of say, Texas, where there is little or no taxation. Where the regulatory environment is balanced between the public good and economic vigor.
Absent Texas job creation, the US is an anemic economic engine. Again, no Texas jobs in the mix and US job creation is stagnant and almost non-existent.
These policies matter. If you are interested in a vigorous American economy, if you want to wipe out unemployment — create jobs, stop making war on wealth and wealth creation.
But, hey, what the Hell do I really know anyway? I’m just a Big Red Car. Be kind to someone you love this weekend, ya’ll. That someone might be you.
