I agree with Republicans on many things, one of which is that tax policy should avoid re-distribution of wealth. However, the conclusion this policy impels is not what most wealthy Republicans would like.
Have you ever noticed when you are riding a bicycle that you cannot tell when the wind is at your back? You just go so much faster and you think it all has to do with you - your pedaling, your skill, your endurance. So it goes with tax policy and wealthy Americans.
Let's take 1980 as a benchmark for this principle. Mind you, we could go back to 1950 and my premise would still carry weight. It is generally accepted that the payroll tax is "regressive" - meaning that it taxes working people at higher rates than either the independently wealthy or high-income earners (say, lawyers and doctors, just to address those who would say I have a bias). This is because you do not owe payroll tax on income above a certain threshhold - around $100K for our purposes (it was indexed a while back around $92K). So if I make $200K, the first $100K is payroll-taxed at 7.65%, and the balance above that - no payroll tax.
Its bad enough that we have a regressive tax system with the payroll tax - its one of a dozen examples I could give (cigarette taxes, alcohol taxes and sales taxes all disproportionately fall on the working class and poor). Basically, once you make more than about $500K per year, a trained monkey cannot help but get extraordinarily rich, unless said monkey spends incredibly wildly. That a lot of bananas. So you would think with the growth in the economy since 1980, the percentage of government receipts (tax revenues) attributable to the payroll tax would be relatively constant? Um, no.
Because, since 1980, the tax policy has been redistributing wealth (towards the more affluent, by the way), the payroll tax as a percentage of government revenues has actually risen. Mother Jones has put together some fairly nice charts and graphs for those who prefer picture books to novels (for example, me). In this article, we see that the payroll tax used to account for about 30% of government revenues (in 1980) and now accounts for 42%, while the income tax used to account for about 47% and now accounts for about 43%. The corporate tax has fallen off a cliff, but because I don't share the liberal orthodoxy of taking corporations (except with respect to retained earnings - mine is a difficult position to put into a 5-second sound bite, so that's for another day), I am not going to complain that "big corporations" don't pay enough tax. Not the complaint of this radical moderate.
My complaint is the dis-ingenuity of the rich folks who are funding the tea party "debate" (not really a debate, but more like a one-sided shouting of superficially appealing policies shrouded in this historical idea that the Bostonians' revolt against the British Parliament's Stamp Act in the 1770's somehow has something to do with rich people paying too much tax today - its not historically accurate, but that is not relevant to these people). They contend that any effort to "raise taxes" (the sound bite used to describe the effort to restore tax policy to pre-Bush-tax-cut levels) amounts to "class warfare" and an effort to "redistribute wealth." Yet, as the Inequality article shows, the tax policy for the past 30 years has actually performed quite well at redistributing wealth - to the highest 1% of the wealthiest Americans.
If anyone should be throwing tea into the harbor, it ought to be the 90% of working-class Americans who are shouldering the increased tax burden since 1980. But, in this Orwellian world where "class-warfare" cries create some sort of "wedge issue" that political advisers have cynically calculated gets them that extra vote, the connotations of redistribution of wealth are instead socialist and egalitarian (rather than classist and aristocratic, which has been the historical truth since 1980). This Kampf of Kochs is remarkably good at obfuscation.
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