Taxing the Rich

September 16, 2012

 

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I wrote this as an op/ed piece some months ago. I think it is still relevant. Please take a look.

Class Warfare

Congressman Paul D. Ryan, Chairman of the House Budget Committee, had terrifying things to say about the Democrats' plan to increase taxes for the wealthy. On Fox News he announced that the bill that would increase taxes on returns with adjusted gross incomes of $1 million or more was nothing less that “class warfare”.

“It adds further instability to our system, more uncertainty, and it punishes job creation,” Mr. Ryan said on September 18. He continued, “Class warfare may make for really good politics, but it makes for rotten economics.”

Ryan’s choice of words summons up visions of Marxist revolutions, the unseating of a Czar, Marie Antoinette’s head on the block, or of states ruled by freely-unelected military cartels overturned by the people they were exploiting. Heaven forefend that such a thing could happen here.

Class warfare usually involves substantial groups at odds. In France class-warfare was the struggle between the poor on one side against the rich (aristocrats in particular). Marx wrote that the struggle was workers against capitalists. So here, Congressman Ryan is saying, we have Americans earning more than one million dollars a year against the rest of the tax-paying population.

Far be it from me to wish harm to Americans earning a million or more a year, all 236,833 of them. And, if the tax code has loopholes that allow these folks to pay a smaller percentage of their income than some one making less--say someone making $40,000 year--well who can blame these millionaires and multi-millionaires and billionaires from taking advantage of those loopholes? These loopholes are legal, and these tax-payers can afford the slick accountants who know how slither through them.

The loopholes need to be plugged by a revision of the tax laws.

But wait a minute. I just got stung with curiosity about what percentage of Americans file these returns of over a million. There are, as I said, 236,000 of them (about the population of Chandler, Arizona). How many returns did all Americans submit? The answer is 140,494,127. (My source is The IRS).

So let’s see what percentage of Americans file those million-plus returns. If we calculate to find what percent of the total returns come to a million or more, we get the following number: .16%. That’s not one percent. That’s not half of a percent. No, that is 16 hundredths of one percent. Wow. Who would have thought?

So, what Congressman Ryan is calling “class-warfare” is, in fact, a conflict between a tiny minority on the one hand and the rest of us on the other. On the one side we have .16% of all taxpayers. On the other we have the rest of us. That’s 99.84%.

If I recall correctly, America is still a democracy. In a democracy the opinions, desires, and needs of the majority are supposed to rule. I think that 99.84% percent is a healthy majority. Furthermore, in a democracy citizens are supposed to be treated fairly and to have equal rights. Is it fair that the very rich have privileged rights and pay a smaller percentage of their earnings in taxes than the average, middle-class American does?

If the Democrats prevail, the additional taxes taken from the very rich would flow to the rest of American taxpayers. Our taxes would go down. If this imposes upon the rich—both those who are productive and those who simply inherited their fortunes—that’s too bad. But believe me, the rich won’t even feel it. It won’t keep them from building million-dollar houses or buying $100,000 cars. (How many of you have managed that lately?) I will save my views on corporations that pay no taxes for another time.

Representative Ryan is blowing smoke. Like most Republicans he is defending the rich against what he sees and their enemy: that’s the rest of us, I guess. This is no case of “class-warfare,” however. This is a simple case of majority rule, where a vast majority has needs and interests at odds with those of a tiny minority. It is a case where power and greed trump the rights guaranteed all of us in The Constitution. This is simply and clearly a case where money talks, has talked, and has convinced, and keeps on talking. Let’s stop accepting the idea that the rich deserve privileges beyond what their riches already give them. Let’s reestablish a state where everyone pays a fair share.