Too Little to Take, Too Much to Pay
Since 2000 and George W. Bush’s long-running cut-taxes-for-the-rich campaign got started, the rallying cry has been that wealthy people pay too much in taxes. This has been propped up by distorted stats like the one InstaPundit is pushing today:
SO I GUESS THE TAX CODE IS PRETTY PROGRESSIVE, THEN: Top 1% Pay More Income Tax Than Bottom 90%.
There are problems with this, however, particularly if you have a memory. Now, mine ain’t all that great, but I do recall that back in 1993, when Bill Clinton wanted to raise taxes on the rich (very marginally, at that), the arguments went like this: If you tax the richest 1% of Americans at the rate of 100%, you could only fund the federal government for one day. Or something to that effect; the message was, rich people don’t really have enough money that taxing them more would make any difference.
Funny how the rich don’t have any money when we want to tax them, but are paying virtually everything when talk comes round to cutting their taxes.
But hey, if InstaPundit and those like him want to insist that their message today is the true one, then I say: if the wealthy are such a bonanza of tax revenues and yet they still have such opulent wealth left over, we should tax them a bit more and solve our budget deficit problems!
Of course, it’s all baloney. Kevin Drum debunks.
I’ve said over and over and over again on this site and others (there is no better way to provoke me), that the rich and the powerful using their influence to avoid paying taxes is responsible for most of the major epic disasters in history – from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Holocaust. For a society it’s like standing up in a canoe – the more concentrated the wealth and power the more likely the canoe of society will tip over, and quite suddenly at that.
Now through into the mix the terrible toll these policies have on families and individuals: both short term, mid-term and long-term. Its a disaster on every level.
The question that should be asked is what percent of society’s wealth do the wealthy own? They make nearly 50% of the income and they own nearly 90% of the property in this country. Yet when wars are fought over this property they don’t do 90% of the fighting and dying.
Another question is what percentage of their wealth are they paying?
A friend of mine, who lives off investments, told me, if you had 1.1 million and paid yourself 70,000 a year, you would only have to pay about $700 in taxes. I don’t remember how he did it – I think he said you could claim that you were paying yourself mostly out of capital gains and under Bush we don’t tax that or some such thing.
I don’t understand the right wing rich. There’s an old saying – pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. I think that was in reference to the causes of the French and Russian revolutions. I find it hard to believe that the wealthy aren’t smart enough to know that.