About the Book: Opening Thoughts of Each Chapter
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Chapter 4-7: There Is No Such Thing As Unearned Income
Here's another one of those great myths used by the Pols&Crats to justify stealing from productive citizens. The government very cleverly divides all income into earned income and unearned income with the clear implication that earned income is somehow noble, and unearned income is suspect and, therefore, okay to plunder. Obviously, only greedy people have unearned income, and it's okay to steal from those greedy folks.
What does the government mean by "earned income"? It means any income that derives from wages that can be taxed. All other income is unearned. From the government's point of view, if you loan your unused work receipts to someone else to use, so that they can earn "earned income", the fee you realized from that act is plunderable unearned income in spite of the fact you've paid taxes on it as you earned it.
Let's say you have saved some money and have put it in your own retirement account, one that is not government approved. (Gasp!) Never mind that you have already paid taxes on the income before you put it into the retirement account, the money that you now have in that account will have to pay a tax on its "unearned" interest income.
Say you and your spouse now decide that since you are about to be laid off from your existing job in the recent consolidating downsizing, it would be a good idea to start your own business. You cash out your retirement account, and you hock your house for your initial capital. You work eighty hours a week, and you do this for five to ten years. At the end, you've made a great success of the business. Guess what! You now have one whole bunch of unearned income that the government will be pleased and delighted to take from you since you haven't "earned" it. It's unearned income. This is another one of these myths that we've become accustomed to that allows us to steal from each other with absolute impunity.
Going after the rich is always easy stuff for politicians, but one of the unintended effects of these gross class warfares is that the line separating the rich from the rest of us is getting lower and lower. It's allowing politicians to target for plunder larger and larger groups of people. Politicians justify this plunder by believing that:
• Most people, especially rich people, underreport their income so it's therefore justified to raise their income tax to compensate.
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