Justifying Progressive Tax Rates
by Mike Kimel
Justifying Progressive Tax Rates
Cross posted at the Presimetrics blog.
The Atlantic’s website carries a blog by a conservative/libertarian who writes very well on a wide variety of topics, and who sometimes covers economic issues with great insight. Of course, I’m talking about Andrew Sullivan. (What, you didn’t think… of course not. Don’t be ridiculous.)
A smart writer – even one you don’t always agree with – also has smart readers. (Of course, the flip side is that a clueless writer who gets the facts wrong all the time also has clueless readers who get the facts wrong all the time.) Here’s a bit of a letter one of Sullivan’s readers readers sent him, reproduced on Sullivan’s blog:
I’m a bit late with this, but I wanted to respond to your post yesterday in which you wrote:
“To many on the right, this inequality is a non-issue, and in an abstract sense, I agree. Penalizing people for their success does not help the less successful.”
Let’s look at this issue another way: A homeowner who owns a $1 million home will pay more for insurance than will the owner of a $200,000 home. The insurer is not penalizing the first homeowner for his success. The first homeowner simply has more to lose and therefore pays more. If you believe the core function of government is to provide a stable environment (physical, financial, legal, social) in which society can flourish, the wealthy have more to lose from government’s absence. Penalizing the successful wouldn’t help anyone. Underwriting the successful costs money.
Later in the post, Sullivan goes on to inadvertently disrespect Hauser’s Law. Sullivan’s blog is not an “econ blog” but I think it has better economic insights than a lot of blogs that are, even if I often disagree with his politics.
Teddy Roosevelt said ‘a man who has more, has more stake in the government and should pay more’. That is sound.
Sullivan may not be an economist, but he practices the “art” of writing and sharing opinion (Teddy might have called that rhetoric), in guise of argument.
Sullivan and his writers are responsible for their logic fallacies.
The statement “Penalizing people for their success does not help the less successful”, is unsound because there is no defensible argument for whether penalizing someone might not help someone else.
Unless one can generalize that “penalizing people” takes stuff away from the “less successful” (soft ad hominem), like spending all the borrowed SSTF on wars, deliberately starving the beast which gives succor to the “less successful”.
That Hoover engages in logic fallacies caused Krugman to coin the term humbug factories.
Opinion is selling unsound logic.
Well, I don’t know that it rises to the level of unsound logic. Thinking of taxes as punishment is a sign of an unsound brain. But I suspect it is related to the general idea of using the tax code as “incentive,” which is unsound policy.
A government needs taxes to do what “we the people” need done. It collects the taxes where it can… in a way that is roughly “fair”.. but not so fair that you can ever tell who got the biggest piece of burfday cake.
The Rich, like it or not, have the money. Taxing the poor is like taxing the cows.
As the corporations like to tell us every time someone proposes a tax on them, it will be passed through to the customer.
PUt up a reasonable progressive tax and the economy will adjust to it. That’s what free markets do.
from AB 2007:
http://www.angrybearblog.com/2007/03/eightnine2718281828mu5-on-taxes-and.html
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Eightnine2718281828mu5 on Taxes and Income Mobility Posted by cactus | 3/28/2007 07:43:00 AM 67 comments
Hoisted from comments, Brad DeLong-style…. these are comments by reaer eightnine2718281828mu5 which I have taken the liberty of editing slightly.
The left claims that economic mobility isn’t what it used to be, and complain about the fairness of a system that locks people in place based on their birth status. The right claims that this is nonsense; that economic mobility is alive and well in the US.
Well, let’s take the right at their word. I propose that we increase taxes on high income individuals (income taxes, payroll taxes, social security taxes) and lower them for the low income individuals since the right claims that these are just the same folks at different periods of their lives. It therefore all balances out since a single individual gets the benefits of low taxes early in life, which allows them to accumulate capital quickly so as to be more productive and engage in risk taking/wealth-generating activities earlier than they would otherwise.
And later, when they are reaping the benefits of their accumulated wealth, we raise their taxes so that we can extend the same courtesy to those coming up the ladder behind them.
If there is true mobility, no one should complain since they reap the benefit at one stage of their life and pay the costs at a later stage of life.
————————————————
Note from cactus – I don’t see the problem with this. Its simple, its elegant, and it should have the support of the folks on the right if they believe what they tell us. But I have a strong suspicion this policy would meet with a lot of resistance.
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Conservatives mis-understand the responsibility they have to pay taxes. The government is much like a venture capitalist, investing in 300 million small businesses. Most of these will fail, a fair number will provide a modest return, and a few will be the next Apple or Google. The system doesn’t work if the Apples and Googles of the world get to quit paying after merely paying back the money invested in them with modest interest.
The rich have a responsibility to pay whatever our democratic society deems fair. They have known this since childhood, and have agreed to it by staying in our country. They are free to opt out and leave any time they like, and that is a more-than-generous option.
Avoiding taxes isn’t akin to preventing theft. Rather, it is stiffing your business partner out of his share of the company.
It it certainly time that Democrats made a stand: no more cuts on the back of the middle-class and poor until the rich have made some major sacrifices. The reversal of any tax cuts passed in the last decade would be a good start.
eight nine
i agree in general, but not about Social Security. that’s not really a tax, but an insurance payment. turning it into a “progressive” tax turns it into welfare. bad. bad. bad.
as for the rest, a straightforward progressive tax accomplishes exactly what you are calling for here. the trick is to take the tricks out of it. and stop pretending it has anything to do with “fairness” or “justice” or “incentive.” That’s just a game that people play looking for an angle. We could do with less angles.
Chad
hate to say this, but i agree with you. thing is, though, that the middle class and poor don’t pay “more than their share.” it’s that the rich pay less than it takes to keep the country solvent and they are the only ones with enough money to do that.
their lies about “creating jobs” are getting a little hard to take, much less believe.
in any case, if they want to live in the bahamas, or run their business in china… more power to them. just expect to pay a tarrif when they try to sell goods to americans.
of course the way things are going, americans won’t have the money to buy even “made in china.”
at that point, the corporate types expect to make money selling to the new chinese middle class. they are going to be very surprised when the chinese say, “thank you very much, but we don’t need you anymore.”
Just to poke the hornets nest with a stick, under a flat tax rate system those with higher incomes would pay more taxes, perhaps accomplishing the same thing as progressive rates.
Coberly, my wife and I earned $80,000 in salary and bonuses last year, and another $25,000 in untaxed benefits. We paid $5300 in federal income taxes, using no gimmicks – just the standard deductions and a tiny bit of student loan interest. The idea that we are paying our fair share is laughable. It’s not just the rich with taxes that are too low, it is all of us. We democrats need to grow up and admit this. If our federal taxes were raised by half, my wife and I would suffer no serious consequences at all. Not even remotely. We’d save a little less, party a little less, travel a little less, and buy a little less junk that we didn’t need in the first place. That’s pretty much it.
I’ve spent enough time arguing with libertarians to know what their response to this would be:
They’d say this:
“There’s a difference between insuring against an act of God which might damage a house…like a hurricane…and insuring against acts of man, which might endanger a society; like social and political unrest. The latter has more in common with the Mob boss who shakes down a small business owner for protection money. “Nice little place you got here, shame if anything happened to it.”
To which I say, “and so what?”
Be a bit careful with the “stability” argument. Every dictator (up to and including the unlamented Mubarak) promises stability. It’s one of their big selling points, and it has a big appeal for certain sorts of people. If you start believing that stability is “the core function of Govt.” you can find yourself in bed with some pretty unlovely types. Do you really want to be there?
Chad
hmmm. man after my own heart. i don’t know that the poor are undertaxed, but i sure hate to hear folks say “tax the rich man.” not that i don’t think the rich man needs to pay more taxes, but there is something sick and self defeating about always saying tax the other guy.
i kind of stumbled into a point of view similar to yours when i had to pay a bill i didn’t think was “fair.” then i realized it’s all caesars money anyway. i have no god given claim to 100k as opposed to 80k … that is if i “earned” 80 k instead of 100k i wouldn’t know the difference… that is, why my “work” was worth 80k or 100k or 50k…. So why should “earning” 100k and having 20k of it taken in taxes make me think i am being robbed?
this is hard for me to explain to people, but i think it is one of the foundations of sanity.
rusty
i don’t understand your point. a guy who earns ten k and pays 10% will have 9k left to buy groceries and pay rent. a guy who earns 100k and pays 10% will have 90k left to buy groceries and pay rent. seems to me there is room for some progressive taxation there without harming the richer guy in anything but his sense of “mine!”
gordon,
no. but there is such a thing as a “reasonable point.” trouble with most libertarians and such is they don’t have brains, but on-off switches. i think i can tell the difference between “what it takes to assure a working (stable) society” and “tyranny is better than “instability.”
Jack
i don’t think i’d say “so what.” i can tell the difference between a shakedown and a traffic light.
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We could do with less angles.
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Different people respond to different types of messaging; intellectually impatient voters seem to respond exclusively to ‘angles’ so you need a product to address their needs.
Point being the rich paid 10X of taxes paid by the the poor guy, so have we not already suceeded in progressive taxation in that sense?
Just trying to stir up a little conversation……….
intellectually impatient. i like that description.
but being somewhat impatient myself, i don’t know if i really want to address their needs.
funny thing is, i can see that’s why we hire politicians… but somehow i always end up feeling that insanity wins the day.
rusty… yes. i would grant your point. under protest. the point i point out is that if we just tax everybody a “flat tax” the poor won’t have enough to eat, the government won’t have enough money, and the rich will still have enough to choke on.
the only reason to tax the poor at all is to keep them honest… that is knowing that at some level they need to pay too. as for the poor us middle class… well, i agree with chad above.
“They have known this since childhood, and have agreed to it by staying in our country. They are free to opt out and leave any time they like, and that is a more-than-generous option. “
Please tell us exactly how we’re supposed to opt out. I would like the smallest federal government possible. Where I can go for that?
The only realistic option I see is to have libertarians gain mindshare and political power. I would certainly prefer to just leave.
Could you possibly allocate a state just for us and leave us alone? Thank you for your generosity.
An essential element of stability is non-centralization of functions. Think about it.
There are several options for you, Sarath. The ones that come to mind first are Sudan and Somalia. Let us know how that works out for you, m’kay?
oh Lisa
i think about things all the time. and what i think about your “meme” is that it is over simple.
and hard to apply to any real world i know about.
Renounce your citizenship and leave. Buy a boat and live on the libertopian high seas, for all I care. We won’t even make you return your education on the way out the door.
You chose to stay here, and as long as you make this choice, you are bound by our rules.
“Could you possibly allocate a state just for us and leave us alone”
If you possibly could leave everyone else alone, this might be a valid argument. But you can’t. Everything you do affects other people.
Actually, when it comes to our total tax system, our system is only mildly more progressive than a flat tax. Remember, sales, excise, FICA, and property taxes are all regressive. Our progressive federal income tax only barely offsets this. Many state income taxes are flat, some are progressive.
Read the “taxation in the united states” article at wikipedia. It lays this all out in full.
Chad
mostly true. but FICA is not a “tax” it’s a Federal Insurance Contribution. The difference is important. You get your FICA “tax” back. with interest. Try that with your income tax.
You undoubtedly get benefits from the income tax, but they are hard to trace with a chain of ownership. And that is important.
On the other hand, when “the rich” lump FICA in with the “huge tax burden” it is fair to point out that it is a tax they do not pay.
I don’t believe in a philosophy of “soak the rich”, but I do believe that one of the roles of government is to protect people who cannot protect themselves. Lately, we have seen that our system allows the rich to protect what they wish much more effectively than it allows the anyone else to choose what to protect. We have checks and balances between the parts of the government, but not enough between the rich and everyone else.
The hedge fund managers will certainly say that we are penalizing them if we tax their remuneration as income, but that loophole is a clear indication of unbalance in creating rules. The financial industry will say a financial transaction tax is punative, but it would provide a meaningful check on the generation of useless activity. Corporate lobbying needs more checks. Closing some of the loopholes that reduce the progressivity of our taxation would help the balance.
Hmmm. I make a lot more than a janitor. Do we need checks and balances between the middle class and the poor?
Even under a flat tax there is no reason to tax the first dollars.
First, the commenter in the OP supposes that people have preferences such that when someone loses something the disutility is greater when they are richer. This is actually the opposite of what people normally say. For instance, a relatively common argument for redistribution of wealth is that when you take some money from a rich man and give it to a poor man, the poor man has a greater increase in utility from the transaction than the rich man’s disutility. The commenter is saying the opposite and that the rich man actually values his money more than the poor man. Normally, a redistributionist would say that when a rich man loses something it IS NOT as big a deal as when a poor person loses it. Imagine instead that thet 200,000 house was a card board box, would you still argue that the rich man is worse off? You can’t have it both ways.
As a second point, I assume that the commenter in the OP means that the insurance policy divided by the value of the home is greater as the value of the home increases. Otherwise it’s not very interesting. I could think of plenty of economic reasons for the insurance to be priced that way. Most obviously, the rich house might have greater risks. Suppose they are next to each other, a burglar would guess that there are more valuables in the rich house. Or, fire risk may not increase linearly with house size. Or, the house could be unique. A Frank Lloyd Wright home would likely be insured for more than the cost of a home that costs the same money but by a less well-known architect. Alternately, the rich man could have more “priceless” items in his house that he wants to protect. These items would be hard for the insurance company to value. Finally, the rich man could over-estimate the probability of his home being damaged relative to the man of more modest means.
“…the rich pay less than it takes to keep the country solvent and they are the only ones with enough money to do that.”
— Yes.
A flat tax makes the numbers proportional.
It does not make the constraint of choices proportional.
That is the difference.
Where in the Constituion is the language on constraint of choices? I missed it.
rusty
you will be glad to know that it never occurred to the Founders to tax the poor.
Arne
i am not sure that the language of checks and balances is exactly what we need here. maybe in the sense that the poor many always need a check against the rich few. but of course the constitution was carefully designed to protect the rich few from the over reaching of the poor many.
the problem we are having is that our democratic checks are not working. the rich have pretty much bought the president and the congress and the courts.
not to say the souls of the voters.
Try Belize.
There are a few places for ex pats in Mexico as well.
I think checks and balances may be exactly the right language. The constitution has checks and balances to keep the power of anyone within the government from becoming too great. It has not enough to control the balance between those in the government and those outside. The vote is not enough when money has so much power.
In an exact sense the poor need a check against the rich.
Arne
I had about talked myself into agreeing with you by the time I finished my reply to your first comment.
On the other hand, if the Constitution is not protecting the poorish from the richish now, I can’t see an obvious way to fix it.
Of course there is always the “Allons enfants de la Patrie!” solution.
I am confused as to why you asked that question.
In the post I responded to, you said that a flat tax might accomplish the same thing as a progressive tax.
I stated why that was not the case.
What does that have to do with the Constitution?
You question strikes me as deliberate hand waving and obfuscation.
“Could you possibly allocate a state just for us and leave us alone? Thank you for your generosity.” Sarath
I suggest Wyoming, and while we’re at it how about combining all states with populations of less than 5Million with geographically contiguous states so that no state has less then 5Million and let them then be represented in the Senate in that manner.
How small a government is sufficient to organize and protect a country of 300Million, a complex federal structure, a complex economic system in a complex international environment?
Sarath, look in the dictionary under selfish or sefl centered. is that your picture in the inset?
Coberly
That was Jack Slack, not Jack. Please recognize the distinction. By the way, Slack,
where did you come from?
What would be the legal authority for “constraint of choices?” Why is that a superior philiosophy to something else?
If under a flat tax the person who makes $100K pays 5X the person who makes $20K, is that not proportional? What legal or ethical imperative is there for a progressive-progressive system?
Perhaps you are referring to the development of strategies for managing common resources as researched by Elinor Ostrom?
“What legal or ethical imperative is there for a progressive-progressive system”
Ask yourself the classic philosophical question of which tax structure you would choose, if you were as of yet unborn and you had no idea what type of situation you would be born into. Any rational person would choose a system where they had to pay more when they struck it rich and less when they didn’t than a system that was flat, or even worse, a head-tax. This is counter-balanced by the substitution effect, which at some point will actually substantially discourage high-income workers from working. We are nowhere near that point with our current tax code.
The flat tax doesn’t work because the income distribution doesn’t occur on the basis of a flat percentage. There needs to be factored into the equation the fact that there is a distortion of that distribution and it is not equal to the distortion in the tax. I’m afraid that I’m not enough of a statistician to explicate the significance of the imbalance of income distribution and how it is not accounted for by flat tax methods.
Our tax structures are not specifically mandated by the Constitution- flat, progressive or otherwise. I do not believe you have brought legal and Constitional imperatives into this converation in good faith. I believe you have done it to distract from the obvious fact that your initial assertion (that a flat tax accomplishes the same thing as a progressive tax) is simply wrong.
Regarding the moral/philosophical differences Coberly gave an example above. Chad has offered a Rawlsian explaination. For simplicity’s sake, I prefer Coberly’s example. The choices in lifestyle and discretionary spending are significantly more constrained by taking 10% of a $10,000/year income than taking 10% of a $100,000/year income.
So, we send all you Libertarians want your own State and the rest of us are to ‘leave you alone?” Ok, what happens when you all start coming down with horrible infectious diseases because you refuse to pay for a CDC or support Government-backed vaccinations? You’ll all likely die but you’d take a bunch of us with you as the infections spread past the borders of your Libertarian paradise. Or what happens when your polluted air and water flows over to our States? Do we have to pay more to clean up our environment because you folks don’t what to pay for it? I suppose we could make up some of our economic losses by taking your patents and ignoring your licenses – you won’t have the Government muscle to back them up.
I’ve never understood why paying your taxes isn’t a prerequisite for other perks the government grants discretionally – passports, driver’s licenses, voting registration.
If you can’t prove you’ve filed your returns and don’t owe why should you get a passport renewal? I know they don’t even check if your returns are current, despite asking for a SSN.
Jack
trouble is Sarath is one of those who thinks “selfish” is something to be proud of. Absolutely does not understand the difference between normal and health taking care of yourself, and “doesn’t work well with others.”
i tend to be a bit that way myself… prefer to work alone, don’t like to share my toothbrush… but at least i understand the point of cooperation and how much richer it makes me.
amateur
i’d go further. i think rich people ought to publish how much they pay in taxes and compete with each other to see who is the most patriotic.
instead of “my yacht is bigger than your yacht” “i have done more for my country than you have.”
Jim
you have to remember that this all started when the “libertarians” of the day wanted to be “left alone” to practice slavery as a private property right.
then they got the idea that they had a constitutional right to take their slaves into free states. where they could rent them out and “compete” with free labor. that’s what got Lincoln ticked. and elected.
and of course then the “libertarians” thought they would just take their slaves and leave the union… and conquer Cuba and Central America and build a slave empire… and otherwise just leave people alone. like they do.
hey rusty
i have given you both the legal moral and practical “imperative.” it’s okay to make silly arguments if you want, but its not okay to ignore that they have been answered.
jack not slack
thanks. i recognized it. just forgot to address it.
Sigh
1) The comment compares absolute numbers, not rates. A flat rate tax satisfies the principle that “the rich should pay more”. It does not “justify the progresive tax”
2) The logic of the comment justifies a legal system and police protection. that is about 1% of all government. It doesn’t address the other 99% – the welfare and transfer functions.
The inequality in wealth with destroy the social farbic and tear the economic apart. Ther are two solutions: higher tax rate for the rich and/or higher minimum wages with strong labor laws promoting strong unions. But if the rich continue to accumulate income and wealth at the increasing rate that they currently are they will ruin the economic in two basic ways: 1) They remove demand from the productive economic by removing money, 2) They increase speculation by using their wealth to invest in stocks, futures and other speculative financial products. The result of this is to either slow the growth rate of the productive economy or worse while the excessive speculation leads to boom and bust which drives the economy into deeper and deeper recessions. As the income and wealth of the rich become a greater and greather part of the economic these negative effects will just get worse and worse.
Jack,
Let me help you remove some of the needlessly complicated words you used to help clarify your statement.
“I don’t like people who have more to keep what they earned. Someone told me it isn’t fair, I didn’t understand it, but I do agree if outcomes are not fair something is wrong and someone with a gun should fix the problem.”
Andrew
its easy to see that you can’t understand needlessly complicated words.
Andrew, that’s pretty good. LOL!
What’s on your mind…
Mark
sigh
i am glad you recognize that the defense budget is a welfare and transfer function.
i would not expect you to recognize that the welfare budget is a defense function.
you’d have to get beyond sighing to understand that.
there is someone with a gun at EVERY political question. if its not your side its my side. or both. what government is is an effort to keep the gunplay at a minimum by agreeing to an orderly way to resolve disputes.
you may convince yourself that the results are deeply unfair in the eyes of God, but the rest of us have to make compromises.
Want someplace to go where government is less intrusive? Somolia, outside the capitol. Libya, of late, south or east of where Gaddafi’s tanks are. There are lots of places with small government.
Of course, the lesson of the Roman, British, Mongol and American empires has been that prosperity is the result of a heavy government hand, as is liberty from oppression by non-governmental oppresors. Miss that point, and Somolia looks pretty good.
You get your FICA back as insurance services. You get your federal income tax back as government services. Different in form, similar in essence. You’ve been playing this word game for a long time. The word game is not an adequate defense of Social Security. Anybody who wants to can simply demand their own definition of terms, and declare that they have won the argument, just a you demand your definition, and claims victory. Social Security serves a valuable function, contributing to making society fairer and more secure. FDR arranged for it not to be a charity so that the rich would not have a motive to wiggle out of it. It was a political decision, and the difference between “tax” and “premium” is political, too. If the rest of the world sees features of FICA that seem tax like that you do not, perhaps that is because they are willing to see those features, but you are not.
Your argument was not based in the Constitution, so demanding that others’ arguments be based on the Constitution is kinda weaselly. If Coyote thinks proportionality of constraint is a valid consideration, who are you to say otherwise.
No Andrew, that’s not a simplified revision. It’s a simply sefl centered approach to understanding the benefits accrued by living in our country. The best way to put it is that those who benefit the most from our system of government and the economy that it maintains and protects are the people who should bear the larger share of the cost of maintaining that system. Claiming that others want the rich to pay for no good reason is itself self serving if you are the rich and stupid if you are not. It’s a matter of giving back in the same manner that you receive.
Sigh
Coberly,
I think police and defense are fairly analogous. Maybe it’s 5-10%, whatever. I’m trying to write a blog comment not a term paper. The main point still stands. This argument covers only a small fraction of government spending and does not come close to justifying any difference in rates.
I think libertarians/republicans/teabaggers need to realize that their boys in the Republican party are FOR redistribution of wealth as well. It’s just in the OPPOSITE direction, from the poor to the rich.
All republicans/teabaggers/libertarians need to realize that their boys in the republican party in congress are FOR redistribution of wealth as well. It’s just in the opposite direction, from poor to rich.
“The property of this country is absolutely concentred in a very few hands, having revenues of from half a million of guineas a year downwards… I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind. Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on.”
–Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, October 28,1785. ME 19:17, Papers 8:682
kharris
well, those “words” are the law. and they make a difference. i have a legal claim to my social securty because i paid a tax dedicated to social security. if i just paid a general tax and had a general claim to “government services” not only would it be easier for those who didn’t want to pay a tax for my services to deny them, but I would not have the satisfaction of knowing that i was paying my own way.
paying my own way is very important to us lower class persons who don’t have the sophistication to realize that the swill all comes out of the same bucket.
mark
there have been other arguments. mostly those that go to the ability to pay. or the marginal value of a dollar… or ten thousand dollars…
if you don’t like what the money is spent on, you can buy a congressman. easier for the rich than for the poor. or buy a newspaper. wait, the rich have already done that.
but while this is not a term paper, you owe it to yourself to find out some facts. living in the warm liquid of your own opinions may feel good… for awhile… but it’s not going to solve grown-up problems.
Thomas
thank you.
as a landowner I can tell you for sure that first, i would never consider taxing someone who owns one acre at the same rate as someone who owns 600 acres. and since the first guy with an advantage got the 6000 or 60000 best acres, that sets up a real physical barrier to the aquisition of wealth to the guy who comes after… however smart and hard working.
recognizing these realities, no sane government taxes the poor at the same rate as the rich.
insane governments however have always taxed the poor at higher rates than the rich. until those government collapsed from their own corruption.
you would think the rich would feel silly going around singing “Oppressed so hard we cannot stand..
Let my people go…”
i see the “tax like” features of SS. everybody does. i point out the not-tax like features because nobody does, and they are important.
trust me kharris, after you have eaten your dinner everything looks the same in your lower intestine. it’s the brain that learns to make fine but important distinctions.
Coberly,
You do far more than “point out features that nobody else does”. When others focus on the tax-like features, you tell them then are wrong. A rather different thing. Nor is it true that nobody else points out the not-tax like features. Yes, there are differences in law between income taxes and FICA. There are differences in law between each and every payment we make to each and every level of government. Pointing that out in no way makes you position the right one. The problem is not that you have no point to make. The problem is that you make it in such an extreme way that you tend toward dishonesty. FICA is not just an insurance premium. It is not just a tax. It has features of both, and to insist that we are only allowed to notice the ones you want is silly.
And, as long as you go wandering through your colon to make indecipherable rhetorical points, I won’t be prone to trusting you.