That’s it. That’s the whole post.
You must not distort justice; you must not show partiality; and you must not accept a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and subverts the cause of those who are in the right. Justice, and only justice, you shall pursue, so that you may live and occupy the land that the HOLY ONE your God is giving you.
Deuteronomy 16:19-20
Matters of Interpretation 
4 responses to “Don’t Cry About the Deficit before You Tax the Rich”
I think a couple things need to be understood about the tax structure, Hat. First of all, we only tax earned income. That means you or I who are earning income to survive. We don’t tax assets or accumulated wealth (except for some local personal property taxes and what have you.) For the most part however, your assets and savings are not taxable, unless they are used to produce income. So one really can be a millionaire and pay no taxes, but simply living off of what you have accumulated. We can holler about the need to “tax the rich” all we want, but we don’t tax wealth in this country at all, we tax production and profits.
One reason why we don’t tax wealth is because you would just loose it all over time, much like the elderly sometimes lose their homes due to no longer being able to afford property taxes. They spend their entire lives paying off their homes, but when they are older and on a fixed income their property taxes increase so much, they can no longer afford to live there. In essence first the bank cleans them out with a mortgage and then the gov comes along and eats up what’s left with taxes. (there are some programs designed to help with this.)
So before we go chanting “tax the rich” we really need to look a bit deeper at how our tax structure is organized and how it all plays into our economy.
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Under the billionaire minimum proposal, however, I don’t think we would be talking about people whose only wealth is there homestead. We’re talking about unrealized capital gains as a revenue source. If people want to talk about their money “working for them” and “earning revenue,” it makes sense to tax that earned revenue.
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And if the tax structure were still as progressive as it were before Regan et al took an axe to it, we might not need to chant this quite so loud in the first place.
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Yes. Applause.
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