The Courage Campaign Wrongly Targets Kim Kardashian to Pay Higher Taxes

Impact

The California-based advocacy organization The Courage Campaign is targeting reality television star Kim Kardashian in an online video aimed to increase the Golden State’s top tax rate by 5%.

But in targeting the actress, the advocacy group forgets that Kardashian has contributed a healthy portion of taxes to the cash-strapped state. California is plagued not by an under-taxed upper-class but instead by a wild-spending government.

Under the tagline “Tell Kim Kardashian to endorse the millionaires tax of 2012!” the progressive organization’s clip superimposes images of her swanky lifestyle along with pictures of California’s poor children and elders, suggesting that the one point tax rate gap between Kardashian and middle class Californians is the culprit for the budgetary woes of a state and its out of control social spending (which have helped California achieve the moniker “the Greece of America”).

Following the already-too-familiar class warfare playbook, The Courage Campaign reminds us that “not everyone was born a Kardashian” by using compelling — yet deceiving — graphics to highlight the difference between the $12 million that Kardashian supposedly made in 2010 versus the $47,000 average salary for middle-class Californians.

In doing so, the group intentionally blurs the differences between crucial concepts such as “tax rates” and “taxes paid” and omits that Kardashian has in fact contributed a healthy $1,236,000 in taxes versus the $4,371 paid by the average middle-class Californian.

The tax-the-rich crowd also forgets to mention that increasing revenue sources without reforming a state that currently spends more in prisons than in education is not the solution, especially when Kardashian could follow other Golden State investors, entrepreneurs, and small business owners who are jumping ship by moving to Florida, Nevada, and other states with more favorable and pro-economic growth tax rates.    

Photo Credit: Beacon Radio