“The Soak-the-Rich tax proposal reduces to the argument that those Americans who made good, and conservative economic decisions in the past should now be forced to pad the pockets of the CEOs who have made unbridled risky business decisions, and of other profitable Americans who over the past decade tried to live far beyond their means.Any proposal to Soak-the-Reach is all too often grounded in the presumption that the rich got their gains through bribes, corruption, and thievery. Some, no doubt did. But now rich retired CEOs who absconded with tens of millions of ill-gotten bonuses and stock options when they were misrepresenting the risks that they had their companies take should be jailed [...]
However, many of today’s rich people have got their incomes in the good, old-fashioned way through hard work, frugality, and judicious and concervative investment policies.
Indeed, many rich people today have actually earned over the course of their lives the lower average wage rate than people making far less. How can that be?
Many rich people of today have put in mountains of unpaid hours in developing a product or a business over the last decade, with their efforts finally paying off today.
Their current incomes may look excessively high, but only because no account is made for all the unpaid hours worked long ago, or for the substantial risks that they took [...]“
(Professor Richard McKenzie, Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine)
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