One more time (for good measure): The wealthy need to pay their “fair share”

Tonight, the president claimed before a joint session of congress that “the wealthy” were not paying their “fair share." His idea is that "the wealthiest Americans and big corporations" should pay their "fair share" in order to reduce the nation's red ink.

This should not come as a surprise to anyone. This is the standard modus operandi for liberals. In fact, this is how they address every issue: it is someone else’s fault. Someone else must pay for it (either literally or figuratively).

Obama, the leader of the free world, has just said that the answer to our fiscal problems is for the wealthy to pay their “fair share.”

But what does that even mean?

Do the wealthy pay a certain amount commensurate with their earnings? Or is a “fair share” what everyone else pays? Or do the wealthy simply pay an amount that someone else has deemed to be "fair"?

What does the president mean by “fair share”? Is he stating that depending on how much someone earns, they should pay more than others? If this is the case, then who decides what "how much" is? Who watches the distributors of "fairness"?

Perhaps if there were an unquestionably good person who was just in all things, then maybe one could tolerate the idea of submitting themselves to that person’s idea of “fair share.” However, who would that be? If men were naturally inclined to act like this, then government would not be necessary.

The simple and sad truth is that men are not angels; we are far from it. That is why a social contract is necessary. It helps to establish the checks and balances necessary to deter one from claiming that he has a right to another’s goods because it’s “fair.” When the government starts taking property in the name of a perceived and mutable notion of “fair,” then that government has lost its reason to exist.

But try telling that to a liberal.

Furthermore, the idea that the top earners in America should ante up and pay their “fair share” is ludicrous on its head, not so much for philosophical and practical reason, but simply because, well, they already do.

Consider these facts: the top 5 percent of wage earners (this includes all income, not just wages, but excludes Social Security) pay 53.25 percent of all income taxes, the top 10 percent pay 64.89 percent, the top 25 percent pay 82.9 percent, the top 50 percent pay 96.03 percent, and the top 1 percent is paying more than ten times the federal income taxes than the bottom 50 percent.

The bottom 50 percent of wage earners? They pay 3.97 percent of all income taxes. In addition, an estimated 43.4 percent of Americans do not even pay federal income tax.

Shouldn’t he be asking for that 43.4 percent and the bottom 50 percent to pay their “fair share”?

Before proposing ideas such as taxing the "fair share" out of the wealthy, the president should really think through what he says.

It is only fitting that this president of all people should be using this kind of language. The rhetoric is not only consistent with the tone of “hope and change" but it also embodies his presidency: things that sound "right" and virtuous at first but turn out to be just a lot of worthless, shallow noise.

(Note: The majority of this story is a re-post from a previous article. It should be noted that when this was originally written, the president had not changed his message one iota.)