New Fox News piece: Class Warfare May Make Good Politics But Is It Fair to the American Taxpayer?
My newest piece starts this way:
With the Senate passing the new tax bill today and the House soon to follow, many liberals are up in arms about not increasing the income tax rates for higher income individuals. According to Democrats, these are the wealthy... the rich... the millionaires and billionaires. And it is only fair that people who earn more should pay more in taxes, right?
The call for increasing tax rates on the highest income individuals is repeated over and over. "I think the people that benefit most should pay most. That's always been my position -- not for class warfare reasons; for reasons of fairness in rebuilding the middle class in America," former President Clinton told the White House press corps last Friday.
Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont called it "a moral outrage" that income tax rates weren't being raised on individuals making more than $200,000 per year. Senators Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) joined Sanders in his filibuster last week.
President Obama has spent the last couple of years attacking those who oppose raising taxes on higher income individuals, and he has continued the attacks this week. "Now I think that [not increasing taxes on the rich] is a mistake," Obama told Channel 9 News in Denver. And he continually promises to increase those taxes in two years when the tax agreement ends.
Obviously the current tax rates as well as any changes being discussed by either Democrats or Republicans ensure that higher income individuals pay much more in taxes. Much of the confusion seems to arise simply from people not understanding what percentages really mean. . . .
posted by John Lott at 6:01 PM
1 Comments:
The term 'class warfare' doesn't do justice to the fact that the upper 2 percent of income earners consist predominantly of small businesses, most of which are sole proprietorships, partnerships, limited liability companies and S-corporations, all of which are taxed at the personal income tax rate, and which account for about 70 percent of the jobs in this country. Raising taxes on small businesses increases their costs, which they pass on to consumers -- us, who then purchase less of their goods and services, thereby decreasing their revenue and hurting their ability to expand and create more jobs.
The problem is that when progressives refer to 'income distribution', they aren't simply using the term in a strictly statistical sense.
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