What John Adams Foretold Has Come True

John Adams, in 1787, said:

Property is surely a right of mankind as really as liberty. … but the time would not be long before courage and enterprise would come, and pretexts be invented by degrees, … in sharing it equally with its present possessors. Debts would be abolished first; taxes laid heavy on the rich, and not at all on the others; and at last a downright equal division of every thing be demanded, and voted. What would be the consequence of this? The idle, the vicious, the intemperate, would … sell and spend all their share, and then demand a new division of those who purchased from them. … anarchy and tyranny commence.

The entire Adams passage is well worth the time it takes to read and understand it. I want to examine (in no particular order) some of Adams’s thoughts and see how he foretold, over 200 years ago, the situation in which we live today.

1. “[T]axes laid heavy on the rich, and not at all on the others[.]” Let’s begin with an easy one — taxation. According to Dr. Walter E. Williams, “[r]oughly 47 percent of Americans pay no federal income tax.” Of the approximately 53 percent who do pay income tax, the following table illustrates Adams’ point, that “taxes are laid heavy on the rich.”

Source: National Taxpayers Union

Remember, the above chart applies only to income tax payers, omitting those who don’t pay income tax at all but still vote. To try to justify this gross tax inequity, Dear Leader Barack Hussein Obama introduced the concept of “fairness” — that the rich should pay their fair share of taxes. But (and there’s always a “but” when Obama is involved) the “rich” pay much more than their fair share when it comes to income tax. Those “non-rich” (let’s say the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers) paid, in 2009 (the most recent year for which data is available), 2.25 percent of all income taxes paid.