Here’s a pattern worth committing to memory: every time Democrats spot a rich American, the answer is always the same — make someone pay more. Never, not once, is the answer to let a working American pay less.
The latest case in point is Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), who, as Townhall reports, is calling to eliminate the cap on Social Security payroll taxes so the ultra-wealthy — think Elon Musk — “pay their fair share.” Her hook is Musk’s ascent to the world’s first trillionaire.
“Elon Musk, the literal richest man on the planet — the world’s first TRILLIONAIRE — is paying the SAME amount in Social Security taxes as an electrician who makes $185,000 a year,” Murray posted. “That’s outrageous. We need to scrap the cap so the richest people in the world pay their fair share.”
Notice what’s missing. The solution is never to have the electrician pay less. It’s always to have somebody — the billionaire today, the six-figure tradesman tomorrow — pay more.
And it wouldn’t stop with billionaires. The current cap on the 6.2 percent Social Security tax sits at $184,500; income above that line isn’t taxed. Scrap it, and the new bill lands on far more than a handful of trillionaires. Roughly 18 percent of American households pull in more than $184,500 a year. That is not the top one percent. That is dual-income families, small-business owners, and the very electricians Murray claims to be defending.
There’s an inconvenient bit of history here, too. Social Security was created and signed into law by a Democrat, President Franklin Roosevelt. Democrats have controlled Congress and the White House many times in the nine decades since, and never once moved to change the cap they now call unjust. They wrote the rules, kept the rules, and now blame the wealthy for the rules.
So where is the tax cut for the teacher making $70,000, or the electrician Murray keeps invoking? It never comes. The math the Left loves — everyone pays the same flat percentage, so the rich must be cheating — conveniently skips the fact that a flat percentage is, by definition, proportional. A billionaire and a teacher paying the same rate isn’t a loophole. It’s arithmetic.
Strip away the trillionaire framing and the pitch is the oldest one in the book: your money would be better spent by them. The target changes — billionaires this week, the upper-middle class next — but the direction only ever runs one way. More. Never less.
Let that sink in the next time a politician insists the wealthy just need to pay their “fair share.” The share they have in mind is always bigger, and it’s always yours.
Source: townhall.com
