Yesterday, Tax Day, was the greatest American holiday — according to the Democratic Party.
You might think of Tax Day as something annoying and awful, that day when you slip a check in the mail that represents a gigantic chunk of your yearly earnings so the federal government can then spend all that money on a bunch of useless horse crap.
But that’s where you’re wrong, according to Democrats. For them, Tax Day is a magnificent delight, a day of festivities for all. We should look forward to it every year because taxes are incredible.
As Joe Biden used to say, they are a sign of “patriotism,” of “social solidarity.”
Or, in reality, sticking it to the people who earn money in the United States.
There’s something even better for Democrats spending all of that magical money on awful nonsense. In fact, that’s the best part: It’s not your money. It was never your money. It was always their money.
They let you control some of it. But the rest of it, they take from you, and then they burn it, just to show you that your economic freedom belongs to them.
The purpose of taxes, according to Democrats, is not a more prosperous society or the obliteration of poverty. The purpose of taxes is quite simple: to punish success.
Of course, they always deny that they believe the more successful you are, the more you ought to be punished.
One of the most seminal political debates I’ve ever covered was the 2008 Democratic debate involving then-Senator Barack Obama, whose answer to a certain question would in any normal world have disqualified him for the presidency.
The question was this: Would you increase the capital gains tax rate even if it resulted in less tax revenue for the government to spend?
Barack Obama said, “What I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.”
You understand? The purpose is “fairness.” That’s the purpose of taxes: fairness, not prosperity. It is not more government revenue to use for useful things. It is to punish people. It is “fairness.”
No Democrat has ever been able to answer this question: What exactly represents a fair tax rate? When is it fair enough?
If the normal person were to pay a 40% tax rate, and Richie Rich were to pay a 90% tax rate, would that be fair? If, in fact, everyone were to pay a 100% tax rate, would that be fair? No Democrat can ever explain what the ideal fair tax rate is, because “fair” is a fungible term.
“Fair” doesn’t mean anything. “Fair” is in the eye of the beholder.
The real key is that you are punishing and reveling in punishing the rich people. That’s what it’s about.
That’s why the Democratic Party on Tax Day put out a tweet saying, “Tax the rich.” Not “help the poor,” “tax the rich.”
That’s all they care about: taxing the rich.
The way you know that it’s working is because you’re making the rich poorer. This is why Zohran Mamdani, the communist mayor of New York, was sitting on a stage yesterday with a gigantic backdrop reading “Tax the Rich,” while speaking about how well all of this is working.
He stated:
And so, for all of the discussion of the imagined exodus that would take place were we to tax the wealthiest New Yorkers by the appropriate amount, I say “imagined” because before I was a mayor, I was a state legislator, and I was part of an effort to increase taxes on millionaires at that time. We were told the same thing then. And what we find now is that we have more millionaires today than we did at that time, even after having passed that tax.
The reason you have more millionaires in the city is because of economic growth, period.
Mamdani, on Tax Day, decided it was time to announce the new pied-à-terre tax. The pied-à-terre tax is a tax on any home that is someone’s second home, a home that they don’t live in most of the year, that is worth more than $5 million.
The sick glee with which he announces taxes has nothing to do with helping people. It has everything to do with punishing people.
That is the glee. This is your smiling Jacobin. If you had a guillotine nearby and he had the capacity to use it, he most certainly would.
He cut an ad — which should creep the living hell out of you if you have half a brain — talking about how excited he is to tax people.
Remember, most people think of Tax Day as a miserable day because you’re giving a bunch of money that you earned to a bunch of people who did not earn that money, just so they can spend it on random crap.
But according to Mamdani, it’s the best day because he — as a useless person for his entire adult life who got elected mayor of New York — finally gets to do the thing he wants to do: Bring the rich low.
He said:
Today we’re taxing. I’m thrilled to announce a pied à terre tax, the first in New York’s history. This is an annual fee on luxury properties worth more than $5 million whose owners do not live full time in the city. Like for this penthouse, which hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin bought for $238 million. This pied à terre tax is specifically designed for the richest of the rich, those who store their wealth in New York City real estate, but who don’t actually live here.
But even so, they’re able to reap the huge financial rewards of owning property in, dare I say, the greatest city in the world. And most of the time these units are sitting empty since, again, they don’t actually live here. This is a fundamentally unfair system that hurts working new owners. Now it’s coming to an end. This tax will raise at least $500 million directly for the city.
I have a question. What is unfair about Ken Griffin spending a bajillion dollars for an apartment and then not spending time in the apartment? Do we really think that Mamdani would be fine with Ken Griffin if he lived in that apartment? Beyond that, doxing Ken Griffin’s apartment is a terrible thing for the mayor of New York City to do.
You notice they use the “Succession” music underneath, because all people who are rich are just like the people in “Succession.”
Except they’re not. I know a lot of rich people. Some are like the people in “Succession,” and many are not. I also know a lot of people who are not rich, and some of them are terrible, and some of them are wonderful.
The idea that virtue inherently correlates with the level of wealth is nuts, but it is what undergirds the level of hatred that Democrats have for people who earn.
All of this ignores that many people who are wealthy today were not so yesterday. I once had very little money in my bank account.
But that’s the beautiful thing about America, and it’s pretty incredible.
Yet according to Democrats, that’s a bad thing; it would be better if nobody had their money in their bank account.
Zohran Mamdani believes that people who earn more in a capitalist society are worse human beings.
And it is a nearly-universal idea among top-tier Democrats.
