Study shows: Higher state taxes on rich won’t drive them out. Someone please tell Mr. Shumlin…

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( – promoted by jvwalt)

So, research now backs up what we all kinda knew was true anyway: increasing taxes on the rich isn’t going to send them packing. On the contrary, they are more likely to suck it up and appreciate the added value of public services.

Not holding my breath, but perhaps Mr. Shumlin will now stop his obsequious behavior and start coming up with some more realistic long term financial scenarios where any necessary tax increases are imposed on those who can, in fact, afford them?

Don’t worry, Peter, those sacred cow millionaire friends of yours will still be your friends (and will still be around for dinner on Friday) — and perhaps, just perhaps, you’re more likely to have a viable state with fewer desperate low income earners when the elections come around…

7 thoughts on “Study shows: Higher state taxes on rich won’t drive them out. Someone please tell Mr. Shumlin…”

  1. Didn’t Douglas’ Blue Ribbon Tax Comission show this already a few years ago? Shumlin already knows this, he’s known this zombie lie for quite some time. He’s just hoping we won’t notice.

  2. This kind of diary could become an annual event here. It’s not that Shumlin et l. don’t know that facts. He/they will not allow mere facts and strong study conclusions to disturb their entrenched article of faith that people just like them will run away from paying their share of public expenses.

    They are like the creationists who will never recognize evolution: anti-scientific. When facts conflict with faith, faith will always win. In this case, it’s faith in the idea that they deserve the privilege that their money buys them, a faith in direct opposition to the sense of obligation some members of the privileged class feel: they’ve been blessed, and therefore they need to do more to help people who have not been so blessed (or smart or lucky).

    Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren said it early on in her campaign:

    There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own … you built a factory, good for you! … You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You are safe in your factory because of the police forces and the fire fighters the rest of us paid for. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or  [you had] a great idea, God bless! Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of it and pay it forward for the next kid who comes along.

    NanuqFC

    The time is always right to do the right thing. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

  3. I think he’s decided he needs to stay in the good graces of millionaires in order to win re-election, or to win whatever he has his eye on next (Leahy’s Senate seat in 2016, if Leahy retires, would be my guess).

  4. It’s difficult to understand why he clings so relentlessly to it in the face of all the evidence to the contrary.

    If he wants to distinguish himself from his challenger, he has chosen an odd way to do so.  Between this and his disinterest in certain environmental protections, sometimes I have a tough time believing he is a Democrat and won’t jettison Single Payer in the clinches.

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