Barack Obama Helps a Waitress
Barack Obama recently sat down with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly for an interview. Among the many disturbing things he said, I found his philosophy of government on domestic issues very telling. His ideas on our responsibility to the poor were summed up by a little story about a waitress. He said that “If I’m sitting pretty”, meaning rich, and there is a waitress who’s having trouble making ends meet, he shouldn't begrudge her some of his extra wealth.
That is certainly a gracious sentiment and the best within us does want to help the less well off among us. If he really wanted to help that waitress he should go to that restaurant every day and leave a one hundred dollar tip. I’m sure she’d appreciate it. That is not what he’s talking about, however. What he wants to do it grab you and I off the street and force us to give her a big tip after he, representative of the government, takes his cut, a rather large cut. What he’s done, however, is taken money from someone else who may need it.
Mr. Obama’s fallacy is his idea that the government can help people better and more efficiently that the private sector. The government doesn’t create jobs or produce anything, it is merely a parasite on all of us. Let’s get back to our waitress. She may be struggling but there are many more like her out there. Perhaps before Mr. Obama and his coercive government mugged me for my one hundred dollar tip, I was going to give it to a waitress at a restaurant down the street. So what really happened here? Mr. Obama takes my one hundred dollars and keeps seventy of it to pay the tax collector, the bureaucrat who manages the distribution, the lawmaker who decided to take my money in the first place, the overhead for the buildings that house all these thieves and the waitress gets thirty dollars, maybe. Would she rather have the hundred? Duh, wouldn’t you? And what about the waitress down the street who I was intending to patronize? She gets nothing. Well maybe not. She might get thirty dollars after Mr. Obama and his government mug someone else. The point is this. Between the two of them, those waitresses could have had two hundred dollars to spend, now they only have sixty. In a consumer driven economy like ours, which amount will help more, which will buy more clothes or groceries or CDs or whatever?
Actually, the whole idea of taking money from the “wealthy” to the people who produce less is preposterous on many levels. Another analogy. A new singer wins American Idol and she goes on a national tour. Tickets for her concert cost fifty dollars each and half a million people come to see her on her tour. At the end of the tour she has made $25 million. I think that would be pretty rich by anyone’s standards. Would it not be absurd for all those people who voluntarily gave their money to the singer and enjoyed the concert to demand that the government now come in and take her money and give it back to them? Yet that’s what we do with the people who successfully sell us the products we desire, be they computer programs, George Forman Grills or gasoline. And to reiterate, we get so little back. In our example we would each receive $15, the singer would have nothing and the government would have $17.5 million to pay for its own perpetual existence.
What about how the government creates jobs by taking that money and putting it back into the economy? OK, let’s look at this example. There is a business making widgets that employs one hundred people. Every year it pays one million dollars in taxes and wastes hundreds of hours complying with tax law and regulation. One year, they secure a government contract for a half million dollars and hire ten more people. The government created ten jobs, right? But if that half million dollar contract created ten jobs, the business could have created twenty jobs if the million dollars in taxes wouldn’t have been confiscated in the first place. So what is better for the economy? It doesn’t take a genius to figure that twenty is more than ten.
Let’s get back to our waitress. If Mr. Obama really wanted to help her there is a lot he could do that doesn’t involve mugging you and I. He could reduce taxes and regulation on her employer, freeing up more money to pay her. We could eliminate all the deductions from her paycheck for programs that are inefficient at delivering basic services and let her control her own health care and retirement. Perhaps she doesn’t want to be a waitress, she likes to cut hair but she doesn’t have the money to go to school and get a license. Why in the world does someone need a license from the state to cut hair?! If we would remove the impediments from her desire to start her own business on the side, she could improve her lot in a dignified way. Mr. Obama and all those who are like you in government, if you really want to help the poorer among us, don’t mug the successful. Get government out of the way, stop taking money out of the economy through taxation, reduce regulation, stop depressing wages by allowing illegal immigrants into the country and allow the goodness of the American people and the genius of the market meet the needs of everyone with dignity and economy.
www.patricksamuels.com
That is certainly a gracious sentiment and the best within us does want to help the less well off among us. If he really wanted to help that waitress he should go to that restaurant every day and leave a one hundred dollar tip. I’m sure she’d appreciate it. That is not what he’s talking about, however. What he wants to do it grab you and I off the street and force us to give her a big tip after he, representative of the government, takes his cut, a rather large cut. What he’s done, however, is taken money from someone else who may need it.
Mr. Obama’s fallacy is his idea that the government can help people better and more efficiently that the private sector. The government doesn’t create jobs or produce anything, it is merely a parasite on all of us. Let’s get back to our waitress. She may be struggling but there are many more like her out there. Perhaps before Mr. Obama and his coercive government mugged me for my one hundred dollar tip, I was going to give it to a waitress at a restaurant down the street. So what really happened here? Mr. Obama takes my one hundred dollars and keeps seventy of it to pay the tax collector, the bureaucrat who manages the distribution, the lawmaker who decided to take my money in the first place, the overhead for the buildings that house all these thieves and the waitress gets thirty dollars, maybe. Would she rather have the hundred? Duh, wouldn’t you? And what about the waitress down the street who I was intending to patronize? She gets nothing. Well maybe not. She might get thirty dollars after Mr. Obama and his government mug someone else. The point is this. Between the two of them, those waitresses could have had two hundred dollars to spend, now they only have sixty. In a consumer driven economy like ours, which amount will help more, which will buy more clothes or groceries or CDs or whatever?
Actually, the whole idea of taking money from the “wealthy” to the people who produce less is preposterous on many levels. Another analogy. A new singer wins American Idol and she goes on a national tour. Tickets for her concert cost fifty dollars each and half a million people come to see her on her tour. At the end of the tour she has made $25 million. I think that would be pretty rich by anyone’s standards. Would it not be absurd for all those people who voluntarily gave their money to the singer and enjoyed the concert to demand that the government now come in and take her money and give it back to them? Yet that’s what we do with the people who successfully sell us the products we desire, be they computer programs, George Forman Grills or gasoline. And to reiterate, we get so little back. In our example we would each receive $15, the singer would have nothing and the government would have $17.5 million to pay for its own perpetual existence.
What about how the government creates jobs by taking that money and putting it back into the economy? OK, let’s look at this example. There is a business making widgets that employs one hundred people. Every year it pays one million dollars in taxes and wastes hundreds of hours complying with tax law and regulation. One year, they secure a government contract for a half million dollars and hire ten more people. The government created ten jobs, right? But if that half million dollar contract created ten jobs, the business could have created twenty jobs if the million dollars in taxes wouldn’t have been confiscated in the first place. So what is better for the economy? It doesn’t take a genius to figure that twenty is more than ten.
Let’s get back to our waitress. If Mr. Obama really wanted to help her there is a lot he could do that doesn’t involve mugging you and I. He could reduce taxes and regulation on her employer, freeing up more money to pay her. We could eliminate all the deductions from her paycheck for programs that are inefficient at delivering basic services and let her control her own health care and retirement. Perhaps she doesn’t want to be a waitress, she likes to cut hair but she doesn’t have the money to go to school and get a license. Why in the world does someone need a license from the state to cut hair?! If we would remove the impediments from her desire to start her own business on the side, she could improve her lot in a dignified way. Mr. Obama and all those who are like you in government, if you really want to help the poorer among us, don’t mug the successful. Get government out of the way, stop taking money out of the economy through taxation, reduce regulation, stop depressing wages by allowing illegal immigrants into the country and allow the goodness of the American people and the genius of the market meet the needs of everyone with dignity and economy.
www.patricksamuels.com
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