Jul
23
Sen. John Kerry’s Tax Dodge
Never met a tax hike he didn’t like – probably because, as an astoundingly rich man, he knows he can hide his wealth from the tax man:
Sen. John Kerry, who has repeatedly voted to raise taxes while in Congress, dodged a whopping six-figure state tax bill on his new multimillion-dollar yacht by mooring her in Newport, R.I.
Isabel – Kerry’s luxe, 76-foot New Zealand-built Friendship sloop with an Edwardian-style, glossy varnished teak interior, two VIP main cabins and a pilothouse fitted with a wet bar and cold wine storage…
This move saved Kerry $437,500.00 in sales taxes and $70,000.00 a year in excise taxes. This is not an unusual thing for a rich person to do.
This usefully brings up something I’ve harped on before – the fact that when liberals, like Kerry, talk about “tax the rich”, they don’t mean themselves. They don’t mean, that is, the super rich. People in the financial status of John Kerry simply don’t pay a lot of taxes – they don’t make a lot of income, you see? Oh, to be sure, they never lack for money, but they don’t make a lot of income, and thus don’t pay a lot of income taxes.
Through various financial gimmicks – all set up courtesy of the very government liberals love – the super rich manage to keep hold of their wealth, expend vast sums of money on personal consumption, and yet pay only minimal taxes. It takes a great deal of knowledge and high priced legal and financial help to do this – and thus such schemes are closed off to most Americans, especially the people the liberals like to tax as “the rich”.
The people taxed are, in a sense, rich. Some of them are worth many millions of dollars. But that is the entirety of their wealth and its usually tied up in productive enterprises. Kerry’s yacht represents millions in wealth, but its just a rich man’s toy, and only a tiny percentage of his total wealth – someone else might have the same amount of millions, bu it is in a construction firm, or a doctor’s office, or a soft war company and its all he’s got.
This is why we conservatives say that taxing the rich is counter-productive. Its not that we love the rich, but that the rich who are being taxed are our most productive citizens. Meanwhile, people vastly richer are let off – and will continue to be let off because such a large number of them are liberals, like John Kerry.
The dichotomy in America is not between rich and poor so much as its between productive and non-productive. The battle is between, in the end, filthy rich tax cheats like Kerry, and tax-burdened businessmen and middle class wage earners.
HAT TIP: Jammie Wearing Fool
