Dreams Never End

Fox News has begun broadcasting from an alternate reality where Hillary Clinton is president and is traveling the world calling for higher taxes on The Rich and using the government to establish "fairness." There really is no other explanation for this story: Clinton: Rich Not Paying Their Fair Share In Taxes

The rich are not being taxed enough and the economy is suffering for it, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Thursday.

The former first lady broached the subject during a national security discussion at the Brookings Institution. She lamented that the United States has lowered taxes on the wealthy and said nations around the world need to "increase their public revenue collections" to spur investment.

"The rich are not paying their fair share in any nation that is facing the kind of employment issues (the United States is), whether it's individual, corporate, whatever the taxation forms are," she said.

The last I checked, Clinton is Secretary of State. She is not Treasury Secretary, Fed Chairman, head of the OMB, or Christina Romer. What Clinton is is a leftist who can't stop broadcasting her resentments against private capital, even as she has grown wealthy herself. What's really eye-opening is Clinton's idea of a more enlightened society:

Clinton pointed to Brazil's high taxation as an example that other countries should strive toward.

"Brazil has the highest tax-to-GDP rate in the Western Hemisphere and guess what -- it's growing like crazy. And the rich are getting richer, but they're pulling people out of poverty," she said. "There is a certain formula there that used to work for us until we abandoned it, to our regret in my opinion."

Brazil?? Is that the same Brazil that is (1) deforesting the Amazonian rain forests (2) drilling for oil using deep water platforms and (3) turning crop land over to bio-fuels. In other words, all of the things that Clinton's fellow partisans would never allow in a million years. Brazil's also famous for a glittering wealth/teeming slum dichotomy that has launched a thousands PBS documentaries. Clinton says Brazil is "pulling people out of poverty." That may be, but the level of desperate poverty seen in Rio's slums hasn't been seen in the US in generations, if ever. Anyway, what does that have to do with taxes? Has Clinton considered whether Brazil might be better off with less tax? Probably not. While Republicans must endlessly refight the Sixties civil rights movement, liberals never have to answer for the dramatic results of the tax cutting movement of the Eighties. Instead, they can just keep repeating the same tired themes: "the better to redistribute you with, my pretty!"

It should be no surprise that someone like Hillary would look to South America for a example of good governance. There, the left-wing lawyer wife of the President can herself become president, where upon she can traipse glamorously on the world stage while seizing pension funds and private savings for the social good. Some have expressed regret that Obama became president, rather than the supposedly more pragmatic Clinton. I say we would have had a 100% chance of electing a leftist with passing complexion all the same.