Burn of the Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
“Tax-cuts-for-the-rich” is a fixture of the agitprop traded in by Bernie Sanders and Robert Reich.
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The sectoral preferences should be scraped out of the tax code, and, in re the general income tax, the rate structure simplified.
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The complaints you had about the distribution of burdens were more valid in 1980 when you had higher marginal rates and the deductions and exemptions for special interests accounted for much more in context. Circumstances change, but attitudes do not.
Too many on the Left have a pirate treasure or jinn’s cave view of wealth. They have little idea how it gets there or that assets are different from income. They think it’s in some Scrooge McDuck’s money bin. Here in California we have constant crabbing about the “house rich”: older people with homes they bought for 15-25K now worth over a million, but with modest incomes. The screwballs also don’t get that we are not in the age of landed estates: that wealth can move in the blink of an eye to places beyond their reach.
There are some simple administrative tricks that could be done to change this.
Chief among them would be to show Americans what they actually pay in for what. Most Americans are unaware that they pay little or negative income tax. On the other hand, most are getting hit hard on Social Security and Medicare.
Withholding (aka hiding the tax) greatly contributes to American ignorance on who is taking money from their wallet and why.