Two top Democrats revealed there budget plan in a Star-Ledger piece entitled Helping NJ senior citizens with true 'shared sacrifice'. They write:
"The Democratic plan to protect New Jersey’s most vulnerable residents calls for a one-year income tax surcharge on the 16,000 New Jerseyans with taxable incomes of at least $1 million. The surcharge would raise about $630 million and eliminate Christie’s plans to force senior citizens to pay higher prescription drug costs and property taxes.
"This is a compassionate approach that allows the shared sacrifice of our most fortunate 16,000 residents to help more than 600,000 senior and disabled citizens who struggle to pay for medication and keep their homes. This plan spreads the pain and protects our most vulnerable."
I've left the following comments:
Posted by zemack
May 12, 2010, 7:18PM
No armed street thug with a gun would have the gall, or the dishonesty, to claim that he is “compassionately” “allowing” his victim to “sacrifice” his wallet to pay for his needs.
No street thug would be so brazen as to claim that his gun does not represent force, but taking responsibility for paying his own way, does.
Oh, but Senator Sweeney and Speaker Oliver don’t want the tax loot for themselves. They only want to funnel that dough to “New Jersey’s most vulnerable residents”, who may or may not like the idea of being made parasites. Apparently, the 16,000 victims of their scheme of legalized armed robbery are not “vulnerable”. There’s one minority group the Dems don’t care much about. Like all humanitarian types, what these politicians seek is the phony prestige of practicing charity with other people’s tax money.
But the “most fortunate” deserve it, right? After all, it’s “the multimillionaire corporate titans, bankers and hedge-fund traders whose actions led to the recent recession.” It could not possibly be the government’s affordable housing crusades enforced through a massive interlocking network of agencies, bureaucracies, loan guarantees, laws, controls, printing-press money and untold market-distorting policies that caused it. It’s all the fault of 16,000 NJ residents, who are indicted, tried, and convicted, without evidence and through guilt by association, of causing the recession – then sentenced to need-based tax penalties. I cannot believe the authors made that statement!
The morality of need worship, which preaches that we are all our brothers’ keepers, will always lead to tyrannical socialist schemes in which the government merely wants to “allow” us or “help” us to be moral and “sacrifice” for others. Under the opposite moral principle, that each of us owns his own life and possesses unalienable individual rights, we are free to engage in voluntary charity to causes and fellow citizens we deem worthy. But there are no predatory politicians or voting blocs looking to sacrifice some to the needs of others through legislative force.
The national financial crisis and NJ’s fiscal calamity are both rooted in the political implementation of the principle that need is an automatic moral claim on the wealth produced by others. Until we recognize that production, individual achievement, personal responsibility, and respect for the rights and property of others, not any kind of sacrifice shared or otherwise, is the moral ideal, we will lurch from crisis to crisis until we go over the edge into the collective abyss.
