A Person’s Value as a Human Being Cannot be His or Her Ability to Make Money
Tax the rich? How about we tax everyone who can pay.
The claim that a person’s value as a human being cannot be his or her ability to make money should sound like a moral proposition, even an imperative, one that we must endorse. This is not just about access to health care, but includes affordable housing, good schools and safe neighborhoods
Yet … and yet we know that in the real world one’s ability to make money strongly impacts his or her quest for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Why is this troubling me today, though? I’ve recently come from a visit to the Hillwood Estate, Museum and Gardens in Washington D.C., a property built up by Marjorie Merriweather Post. I’d never heard of her either before my visit, but she was married for 15 years to EF Hutton of stock brokerage fame and it was the opulence of the place, the ornate furniture and surprising collection of Russian artifacts (including a large oil painting of the last Russian Tsar), even the details of Ms. Post’s full-time staff of 18 who managed the estate during her life (real “Upstairs, Downstairs” stuff) that had begun to wear on me. Oh, the gardens were wonderfully rich and free flowing and the hilltop view of the capital in the distance was inspiring. But then I saw additional photos of not just opulence, but excess – pictures of Ms. Post and her husband’s grand apartment in Manhattan and another grand home in the Adirondacks, then a reference to Mar-a-Lago, which she once owned, and I even learned that she and her husband had purpose-built a four-masted yacht that was said to be the largest sailing yacht ever built, far outdoing ordinary schooners. Did Queen Elizabeth II of England ever sail on such a vessel?
I don’t know how much Ms. Post or Mr. Hutton were worth in their day, but it had to be billions in today’s dollars. Which leads me to turn my moral imperative into a question:
Is a person’s worth as a human being his or her ability to make money? I’m still in Washington as I write this and it is in our nation’s capital where one can perhaps see the most striking divide between the haves and have-nots, except that in the capital it is not the “one percent,” to use Bernie Sanders’ term, but nearly all the legislators and judges and top bureaucrats and lobbyists and university, hospital and non-profit administrators who must be counted among the “haves.” These are almost all people with six-figure incomes plus good health insurance, people who can afford practically anything they might reasonably want to own, and who can send their children to private schools, often while demanding “social justice” for the have-nots but not always delivering.
As for the self-styled “democratic Socialists” such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, it is just too easy for them to criticize the top “one percent” or wear a designer dress to a millionaires’ ball that is emboldened with the words “Tax the Rich.” In a study by the Pew Research Center, “upper income” Americans in 2018 comprised 19 percent of the total population – that’s 65 million people, including their children. (See more here.) They, and the upper-middle income folks just below them, are doing very well. Yet the poor, and the working poor, are all around us, in the nation’s capital and in cities and rural communities across the country.
Well, we have a tax system that is supposed to alleviate much of the problem, or at least narrow the gap between the well-to-do and those nearer the bottom of the economic ladder. Focusing on the top “one percent” almost obfuscates the fact that what we already have is a fair income tax, at least in principle, and which has been on the books for decades. It would work, too, if only it were properly enforced.
So, what’s undermining it? I think we all know the answer to that. The problem starts with, and possibly ends with, the shitload of deductions, exemptions, shelters, loopholes and whatnot that so many people have, and not just the top one percent. It’s a “small p” progressive income tax (you pay more, and at a higher rate, as you move up the income ladder) but it’s become impossible to enforce correctly. The current tax code is 2,600 pages long, and that doesn’t include all the “regulations” developed by the IRS itself to enforce those laws – that’s another 9,000 pages. Read more here; data are from a business-oriented non-profit. Get rid of nearly all the exemptions, etc., outplace a few hundred thousand IRS employees and tax accountants, and the government might have enough revenue to pay its bills, including reducing the approximate $30 trillion national debt.
Even a flat rate tax would be better than what we have now. At least we’d know what everyone is supposed to pay, and they’d pay it (not counting the cash economy, which is another matter, and not a small one).
I know some of the objections to what I’m suggesting, particularly the one related to a flat rate tax. Flat rates taxes are considered regressive because they leave poor people with even less money to live on. That’s why there would be a threshold when the tax begins, and why there would be deductions for children. But it has to stop there. I don’t think even the fictional Ebenezer Scrooge would object to those concessions.
I also know part of the Conservative argument against what I’m proposing – anything that looks like a redistribution of wealth is anathema to them. Well, more than half of federal tax revenues goes to social and safety net programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Unless we change those programs, the money will have to come from somewhere. (See full data on federal spending here.) One can debate the right balance between taxing people and lowering taxes to open up the economy to more growth – that’s certainly above my pay grade – but the fairest way to collect the money people are supposed to pay is a “small p” progressive income tax that is properly enforced with few if any exemptions, loopholes, and so on.
Please set your browser to allow Gnawbone on your Primary email feed, not Promotions.
Gnawbone, where subscriptions always are free.