Shattered Dreams

Have you ever hung out with friends or coworkers and started talking about what you would do if you were rich? Usually the conversation starts the same way. "Man, if I won the lottery, I would..."

Stop. Full stop.

If you win the lottery, your winnings are taxed. If you win big, you will be taxed big. Obama is planning on putting a heavy tax on earnings over $250K. Of course, that $250K will be taxed too, at varying rates from the first dollar to the last, so you won't even net $250K. But he's decided that's as much as any reasonable person should ever make in a year, even though you'd hoped that lottery winning meant that you'd never have to work again.

You'd be better off to not buy a lottery ticket at all. The worst that could happen is that you could win, and why are you bothering to spend the ticket money? If you get lucky, it will all be taken away.

Ever been a kid in the basement with a dinky cheap guitar hoping to become the next big hit? Got your friends together, the level-headed bassman, the over-excited lead singer, the wacky drummer? You might want to rethink your plans. You're a musician, not a business. If you make it big, you'll make lots of money. If you make lots of money, Obama will take it away from you. You'd be better off just getting some midrange job and not trying to 'make it big' at all.

Same thing goes if you're a budding inventor, composer, actor... want to make it big? Watch out. You might make it big enough to attract the government's attention. All the risk you took, sleeping in your car, failure after mind-numbing failure, all the years you spent honing your art, all the college debt you accrued trying to stick out from the rest, all gone. Obama and the Democrats have decided that anyone who puts in the work and risk to make it big is destined to hand their money over to people who took neither the work nor the risk simply to make it at all.

What about small businesses? My brother, a tax accountant, clued me into this one. The common designation for a small business is an "S corporation", due to its risks and advantages. Unfortunately, "S corporations" require you to report your business earnings as income, and you do so before you start paying your employees or rent. So if you make a business income of $300K and have expenses of $250K, guess what? You're going under.

From reading what proponents of socialism have to say, I can only guess that they believe that if you take away the incentive to excel, to 'make it big', to win, that people will continue to try. They seem to believe that people will still reach for the prize, even when there is no prize to reach. Capitalism and the free market believe that they are wrong. History is on the side of capitalism and the free market in this case.

What will happen to this country when nobody bothers to risk becoming The Next Big? When inventors no longer fiddle in their garages, and teenagers no longer form impromptu bands in their basements? When nobody buys lottery tickets for fear they might win? When doctors and surgeons do as some are already planning and quit working halfway through the year to avoid making 'too much money', reducing their numbers and making it very hard to get an appointment in October?

What will become of us then?