Pawlenty and Willie Sutton

Reading what liberals say is an endless source of humor--a great example, the following from an otherwise completely standard lefty diatribe in the Strib about how the taxes on the "wealthy" are too low.

To be the kind of state Minnesota aims to be, it needs a tax policy that heeds the famous advice of bank robber Willie Sutton: "Go where the money is." Right now, Tim Pawlenty is standing in the way.

Is there sort of a "Pinocchio Principle" that the lefties are somehow occasionally forced by the order of things to actually tell the truth even though it is against their nature? In order for MN to be the kind of state they feel it needs to be, the state needs to be more like a BANK ROBBER, and right now that awful Republican Governor is standing in the way of those bank robbers! Imaging that! Oh, the injustice, keeping the robbers out of the pockets of those evil rich!

Oh, if it were only true. This crazy idea that the rich pay "less of a percentage" has the same sort of truthfulness as most lefty "facts". The "rich" pay "less of a percentage" for toilet paper, beer, gas, and everything, because they can only consume so much of most things and their incomes are higher, so DUH ... they pay a "lower percentage". SO ... gas taxes, property taxes, FICA taxes (over $100K income), sales taxes (they save more than most "not rich" people), etc. **IF** you CAREFULLY pick just the right way of selectively looking at STATE TAXES, the rich pay "less of a percentage". Again, not really as a general rule, but you can find SOME CASES that are especially low on gas, property, sales, etc and say a lot of their income is from municipal bonds that are not taxed (which of course is a benefit to the state, since they ALSO pay lower interest to offset the tax advantage), etc.

What they don't say, is to the tiny extent that is true, it is true because Democrats continue to raise exactly the kind of taxes that will add to that situation-the current example being gas taxes. They have NEVER met ANY tax that they don't like to raise, so they don't JUST rob "banks", they are perfectly willing to go WELL beyond the Willie Sutton model and take their money from Widows, Orphans, and little kiddies piggy banks. Once you have established the morality that robbing is OK (in fact, LAUDABLE!), selectivity of targets just isn't a major consideraton.