Let's Talk Taxes

A favorite stance to take among many on the left is that the wealthy in this country should “pay their fair share” when it comes to taxes. 

Here’s a quick scenario- you and three friends plan a vacation together. You charge the hotel room, which costs $400 a night, to your credit card. Do you then…

      

A)    Collect $100 per person for the room.

or

B)    Compare tax returns and conclude that, to be fair, the friend making $100,000 should pay $200, the two making $60,000 should pay $85, and the one making $35,000 should pay $30.

Naturally you’d go with option A.  A person's “fair share” of anything is based on what it costs and how many people are splitting it. It has nothing to do with how much money people make. That doesn't mean that a well-off friend can’t hook up his buddy if he's going through a rough patch. But we call that generosity, not an obligation. Self-righteous liberals would do well to remember this.

It’s convention to say that the government provides us with things- safe roads, police departments, military protection. But the reality is that we, as societies, provide ourselves with these things. Your town has firefighters because the townsfolk pitched in and hired them, not because the government was generous enough to go get them for you. The government is a glorified middle man, and societies elect government office-holders just like your group of friends nominates its most anal-retentive member to book a hotel room.

The governments of the United States, including the federal, state and local levels, collected $4.9 trillion in total taxes in 2011. With a population of 313 million that comes to about $15,000 per person. That’s how much the things Americans have agreed to pitch on (via our representative democracy) cost last year (to keep it simple let's ignore our staggering debt). Your town pitched in for schools, your state pitched in for highways, and your country pitched in to blow shit up in Afghanistan. Everyone’s fair share of all that stuff and more came out to about 15 grand.

Obviously most Americans can’t afford to fork over that kind of money every year. But we can’t kill only the terrorists who plan to bomb an affluent area, or fix potholes only for those above a certain bracket. And nor would we want to. But that means that regardless of how you feel about concepts like supply-side economics and trickle-down theory, those who have the most must pay more than their fair share.

Naturally we’re not always going to agree on exactly how much more the most fortunate (or most clever, or hardest-working, or most devious, or whatever) should pay. That will always be a conversation. But instead of starting that conversation with indignant demands, let’s start it with “thank you.” Thank you for paying more than your share so the children of alcoholics have clean water to drink and safe food to eat. Thank you for paying more than your share so the children of dropouts have a chance to escape the poverty cycle. Thank you for paying more than your share so that working class kids can borrow money for college.

And after that we can all go back to boldly chucking around uninformed opinions on fiscal and monetary policy. Entitlements! Job creators! Job destroyers! Special interests! Pork barrel spending! Blah! Blah!! BLAH!!!