Whoa, look out: a right-wing economist has just said that taxing income over $250,000 at 100% would close the deficit -- according to his calculations, doing so would raise $1.4 trillion, and our current budget deficit happens to be about that. Of course, Mr. Williams didn't put it like that, exactly: he said doing such a thing (which no one, including myself, has proposed) would keep the government running for only 141 days, and then he describes how a number of other initiatives no one has proposed (confiscating yachts and jewelry?) wouldn't fill the remaining 224-day gap -- which conveniently ignores the revenue our government already collects, which would just about cover those other 224 days, and also conveniently ignores that we'd run next year with an entirely new set of collected revenues. Also, too, revenues pay for things we all use. After all, did Walter E. Williams personally build the road that gets him to Georgetown?
Meanwhile, another Washington Times op-ed, another blowhard accusing someone of treason as if he's never read Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution he supposedly reveres. I have to confess that I thought Mr. Nugent's suggestion that it would have been better if the South had won the Civil War seemed a bit incongruous -- would slaveowners have annexed the North and subsequently crafted a better health care plan than the putatively conservative Heritage Foundation did? I wondered -- until I remembered that a Southern victory (and a Northern annexation, which Mr. Nugent takes for granted) would also have ensured that a black man never became President. I still think most folks who hate Barack Obama blindly hate him because he's a Democrat, not because he's black, but most clearly ain't all. In a possibly related note, I suspect that Mr. Nugent could have arranged his paragraphs in virtually any order and produced the same op-ed. I'm not actually going to carry out that experiment to be sure.
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