90% Taxes

So I think Ron Howard is an amazing director. Still just because you can shoot A Beautiful Mind doesn’t mean you really have any credibility outside that field.

Now first up I’m curious how much Ronnie knew about the US tax code and paying taxes back in his days on the Andy Griffith Show. I’m not calling bullshit, because when I was his age I was just earning an allowance and the best I knew about “Taxes” was if I wanted to buy a toy at the store listed at $2.99 it was going to cost me north of $3 before I got it out the door.

Now, around the same time Ronnie was playing Opie another Ronnie was making films in that very same Hollywood. Of course when Reagan got to a point where he was paying 60%-70% taxes he realized he was putting in the same amount of hard work, producing the same amount of product for a shitload less money, and really that would be time better spent relaxing with his family at home or on vacation.

Of course if Reagan didn’t do a movie, the hair and makeup people didn’t do a movie, nor did the set builders or the lighting techs et al. Of course those people were making less money and paying less taxes, but now they were looking for work.

Same goes for those “Greedy” big corporations. If they just made 1,000 Units of a product that they sold for 1 Million, but the next 1,000 will sell for only 500K, and then 100K for the next production run, at what point does it just become a pain in the ass to pay your employees?

Of course it can be hard to simply furlough a manufacturing plant for 3 months, so the smarter business plan would be to lay off half the workforce so that the plant works year-round and never starts building goods for the government for free.

Heck Tam has a neat micro-economic example of the same idea.

the customers are now flowing around us like we’re a rock in the stream of retail commerce, and the rebate seeker ahead of me pouts “Well, fifteen dollars is a lot of money!”

Fifteen dollars? We’ve been standing here for nigh on half an hour! Minimum wage is $7.25/hr! Do the math lady! (It was at this point that I fished in my pocket to see if I had any folding money. As God is my witness, if I’d found a twenty at that point, I’d have handed it to her. My back teeth were floating.)

I’ve done the same thing with auto-repair and home improvment work. There are some things I’ll do, but there are many other things that are too dirty, too difficult, too time consuming, or too painful for the monetary savings to be worth it to break a sweat.

Oh and back to Ron Howard and Jayne Lynch, there’s nothing on your tax return that says “Exact Change Only”, you could cut big daddy .gov a nice fat tip if you think you got too much scratch lying around. Furthermore I wonder if these limousine liberals hire accountants to itemize deductions and factor in expenses and loss in their tax returns? If you aren’t paying enough, why burn calories to pay LESS?

Of course the numbers show that tax-hungry “Progressives” aren’t all that interested in paying their own taxes, certainly not MORE taxes.

They attempt to conflate Marxism with Altruism, when really the two couldn’t be any more dissimilar.