By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, April 10, 2016
There are several expressions that we hear, without
thought and without end, when it comes to the debate about taxes: “fairness,”
the related term “fair share,” “national income,” and “loopholes.”
The problem is that none of these things exist.
Our tax discussion should be dominated by relatively
straightforward (though by no means simple as an economic question) fiscal
questions: How do we raise the revenue needed to meet government spending requirements
in a way that is minimally disruptive to the productive economic activity that
sustains public and private sectors alike? Instead, we spend a great deal of
time talking about moral questions — or, more often, resentments disguised as
moral questions. If you are a private citizen, the discussion usually goes like
this: “Why am I taxed so much, while that guy I don’t like is taxed so little?”
If you are a politician giving this speech to a group of supporters, it is:
“Why are you taxed so much, while those guys we don’t like are taxed so
little?” Often, this question is phrased in relation to how large a share of
the “national income” a certain group gets.
There isn’t any “national income.” There’s what Smith
earns and what Jones earns and what Thompson earns, not a big bucket labeled
“Income” that gets divided up between Smith, Brown, and Thompson. It is a myth
that if the incomes of high-income Americans were lower then the incomes of
other Americans would be higher. They probably wouldn’t change at all, but they
might be lower, too, assuming that some of them are in the business of
providing goods and services to high-income people.
But if we are to indulge the myth of “national income”
for the sake of simplifying the discussion, consider that the Americans who are
among the top 10 percent of all income-earners in a given year (bear in mind
that who is in that top 10 percent changes from year to year) earn about 45
percent of all income earned by Americans. But they pay about 68 percent of all
federal income taxes. Which is to say, yes, they earn more money relative to
other Americans, but they pay even more disproportionate taxes. And yet we
hear, endlessly, from the likes of Hillary Rodham Clinton (who makes $6,000 a
minute giving speeches to investment bankers) and Bernie Sanders (a lifelong
public ward) that these people do not “pay their fair share,” despite paying
taxes that are much more than proportionate to their relative income.
There isn’t any real standard of fairness, which is an
inevitably subjective concept. If we are to use that which is measurable as our
standard, then we have to rely on proportionality, and, by that criterion,
high-income Americans are already paying far more than their fair share, and
most of you people won’t even send them a thank-you note.
For shame.
I am a writer, not an econometrician, and one of the
purposes of literature is to give us some moral insight into questions that are
not strictly speaking matters of deduction or mathematical calculation. That’s
why demagogues such as Mrs. Clinton and President Obama always frame every
political question as white-hats-vs.-black-hats. Herself protests that the top
25 hedge-fund managers (her son-in-law is a hedge-fund manager) out-earn all of
the nation’s kindergarten teachers combined. This is true, though only
trivially true: Hedge-fund managers wouldn’t earn more if kindergarten teachers
earned less, or vice versa. There’s no relationship there. But it’s a memorable
little tidbit.
But if we are to have a narrative ethics (apologies, Adam
Zachary Newton) of taxation, surely it applies to both sides of the question.
President Obama likes to proclaim that, at a certain point, you’ve earned
enough money. Is it not also the case that, at a certain point, you’ve paid
enough tax?
Earlier, I suggested a $1 million per capita ceiling on
federal taxes in any given year. I don’t really care how much money you’ve
made, how rich you are, how meretricious your body of work (greetings, Gwyneth
Paltrow!), a million bucks a year is enough. After that, you’ve done your duty.
A million bucks is a nice, round, easily remembered number, but I haven’t
arrived at it entirely arbitrarily. For $1 million a year, your taxes could buy
a poor family the median American house ($188,900) and a Mercedes E-Class sedan
($52,650) once every quarter, with a few options on the Benz. If your taxes
will buy a family a typical American home and a rather nice German sedan once a
quarter — you probably pay your taxes quarterly in that bracket — then you are,
by God, paying enough.
They’d own those homes free and clear.
Except for the real-estate taxes. The permanent, endless
tax most Americans pay on their homes is one of the most pernicious forms of
taxation, because that tax means that there is no such thing as a homeowner. If
you have a mortgage, the bank owns your house; once you’ve paid off the bank,
the taxman owns your house. You are, in effect, a renter, with the state
holding a permanent lien on your property. You pay a tax when you buy a house
and when you sell a house, and every year you live in that house, too. At some
point, you’ve paid enough. I think a cumulative cap of 20 percent of the
house’s value is fair. If you’re in a relatively high property-tax state such
as Texas (a tradeoff for Austin’s forgoing an income tax), then you likely pay
something just under 2 percent of the value of your home in annual property
taxes. If you acquire a house in your thirties and live in it for the rest of
your life, you’ve probably paid for it at least twice: Once in mortgage
payments, again in taxes. Capping the tax at 20 percent wouldn’t be all that
disruptive, fiscally: Only a minority of Americans keep their houses for ten
years or more.
Capital-gains tax? Ten percent, tops. Why? God Himself
demands only 10 percent of our increase, why should Uncle Stupid get 15 percent
or 39 percent?
But when Uncle Stupid does get 15 percent, the
politicians are scandalized, just as they are scandalized when firms and
individuals take advantage of “loopholes” — which is to say, the law as it
actually exists — to lower their taxes. The reason long-term capital gains are
taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income is that for decades members of both
parties in Congress have argued that we should incentivize long-term
investments. Congress writes the law, firms comply with the law, and Congress
is scandalized. With the leak of the so-called Panama Papers, many of our
British and European friends are watching the same circus: There is in almost
none of these cases of corporate tax planning anything illegal or even
approaching illegal, but the politicians nonetheless pronounce themselves
scandalized by the laws that they themselves have written.
If fairness is proportionality, then high-income
Americans, along with businesses and investors, are paying too much tax. Given
the distribution of benefits, which are heavily weighted toward the broad
middle class, Americans in that bracket arguably are paying too little. If to
“work hard and play by the rules” is our criterion of good citizenship, as the
Democrats are fond of saying, then firms and individuals engaged in minimizing
their taxes by working hard and following the rules — to the letter — should be
admired rather than abominated.
We can make of taxes a moral issue. But that is going to
lead us down some roads that Democrats, and many Republicans, do not really
wish to travel.
Perhaps our tax authorities should stick with fiscal
questions rather than fairness questions.
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