Here's a startling editiorial from former Bush administration spokesflack, Ari Fleischer. In it, he complains that the top wage earners are paying too much in taxes...
Picture an upside-down pyramid with its narrow tip at the bottom and its base on top. The only way the pyramid can stand is by spinning fast enough or by having a wide enough tip so it won't fall down. The federal version of this spinning top is the tax code; the government collects its money almost entirely from the people at the narrow tip and then gives it to the people at the wider side. So long as the pyramid spins, the system can work. If it slows down enough, it falls.
It's also what's called redistribution of income, and it is getting out of hand.
If the premise feels skewed, that's because it is. Fleischer, for example, argues that the top 10 percent of earners "pay 72.4% of the nation's income taxes," and represents the "tip of the triangle" of his oddly unbalanced pyramid metaphor. But...every table and piece of data I can get my hands on shows that the top 10 percent of earners has more than 72.4% of the wealth...which makes the figure Fleischer quotes...reasonable -- until you realize that payroll taxes, which aren't counted as "income taxes," drive up the tax rates of anyone making under $90K, so that an average earner actually pays a much higher tax rate than the upper income brackets.
But the oddest thing about Fleischer's proposal is that he favors the elimination of the payroll tax and a straight, loophole-free progressive income tax as a solution. Which would dramatically reduce the tax burden of the poor and middle class and jack up the rates on the very people he claims are being oppressed in our system...
And you wonder why the "Tea Parties" make so little sense. According to Fleischer, most of the people out on the streets are protesting taxes and government spending of which they are the ungrateful recipients of their betters' largesse. Not that there's much reason behind the protests, which appear to have gotten a friendly boost from FoxNews, whose media personalities are hawking the protests as if they have a financial stake in the whole deal. (Oops! They probably do!) But...why would a bunch of people stand out with signs protesting to protect the tax rates of the ultra-wealthy when those rates are at a historical low, and the distribution of income historically lopsided. If anything, the government distributes income upwards.
Whatever. I'm still waiting for a rational response from the right on how to steer the economy out of the recession. Not that I'm unwilling to listen: I'm personally abivalent about the massive bank bailouts and doubtful about the efficacy of the recently passed stimulus bill, when so many of the bankrolled projects were things like massive and unneeded highway projects... |
