Lane, re: "I find the government taking money from Joe's pocket and putting it directly into what it decides are more deserving pockets, aka redistribution of the wealth, both (a) wrong and (b) not sustainable..."
But isn't that exactly what the government does whenever it sets a tax schedule and collects taxes?
We can call it class warfare or redistribution of wealth or whatever we want, but the decisions regarding how much tax to collect, from who, and how to distribute it results in redistribution of wealth...in every instance.
Those who claim it's "not fair" to tax the very top of the income scale in order to partially fund a tax break for those in the middle class seem to be pretending that we're starting from an even playing field.
The fact is that the very wealthy have, for decades, worked the Congress and the executives to make sure that progressive taxation was, at the very top income levels, a myth rather than a reality. That relative redistribution of wealth....UP from the middle class to the ultra rich instead of down....has been going on for years.
Those who made enough money to generate rates at or near the top tax rates, but not enough to justify the machinations to find loopholes, understand who has born the heaviest burden of paying for our government. And that doesn't even consider the huge amount of corporate welfare that went to the huge financial interests that financed the campaigns of our career politicians.
So tax and spending policies result, as a the practical effect, in a "redistribution of wealth."
The important questions are whether the redistributions make sense from efficiency points of view and fairness points of view.
The Republican argument against taxing the "captains of industry" rely on the theory that those decision makers are anxious to get more capital to invest and create more jobs. The Democratic argument for taxing the wealthy is that it's fairer to take a larger percentage of the income of one who has far more than he needs in order to live well, and less from one who is not so fortunate.
The Republican argument is one that can be objectively examined and the fact is that in some economic environments it's accurate and in some it's not. Lately the economy has been in a condition where the trickle down theory is ludicrous.
I believe the "fairness" argument was, before Reagan, pretty well accepted as an American value. Since Reagan, however, it's been challenged but it's a subjective one that doesn't lend itself to objective assessments.
We can argue fairness and efficiency but we should not shrink from the fact that the choices we make are, among other factors, redistribution of wealth choices. Ed |
