I have to admit that I’m puzzled by the amount of sympathy for the very wealthy.
Not everybody is prepared to feel their pain, as the re-election of Obama, with his interest in raising taxes modestly on the 1% ,would suggest. But what about the Republicans and their constituents who seem so reluctant to exact another penny from the poor beleaguered filthy rich?
And there’s the Gerard Depardieu phenomenon. This iconic French movie star and very wealthy guy recently moved to Belgium to avoid the threatened 75% super tax and according to an article I read, many people feel sorry for him having to leave his beloved France.
How unfair, they cry, for this great man of modest origins to be p unished for his success by being slapped with a big tax (which of course would still leave him comfortable beyond the wildest imaginings of most of us).
I’ve heard the theory advanced that a lot of us favor going easy tax-wise on the rich because we think, Hey, maybe one of these days I’ll become a billionaire myself and then how will I like having to give so much of it back.
I’ve also had it explained to me that some of us support a super-wealthy class just so the rest of us can replace our own dismal economic reality with vicarious pleasure at seeing the very wealthy at play with their trophy houses, wives and yachts.
I don’t think a graduated income tax is intended as a punishment, but rather as acknowledgment of certain truths we are taught in our earliest history classes where we learn the basics about pursuing happiness in the USA.
We learn that individual initiative is a good thing, the creative enthusiam of c oming up with something new and useful to p eople, the better mousetrap, the rest of us b eating a path to the door, and all that.
But, as we also are taught in those early history lessons, at some point, if your enterprise gets big enough—and that’s the goal, right?–it goes wrong. All that good, useful, creative stuff gets turned into its opposite. Young, eager, honest Horatio Alger entrepreneurs turn into Robber Barons, whose greed and ruthlessness led them to exploit workers, including women and young children, with speedups, firetrap working conditions and 15 hour work days; to cheat by forming monopolies. (The idealistic novels by Alger overlapped the coinage of the latter term in the late 19th century.)
Finally, we learn, the wealthy and their big corporations ran the system into the ground (the Great Depression) and government needed to get bigger than it had ever been before to save the nation, including the corporations themselves (the New Deal, including the graduated income tax.)
We are taught early in school the logic and fairness of a super tax on the very wealthy. It’s not charity.
I hold with an optimistic reading of the Declaration of Independence. The famous insistence that we are all created equal with the “unalienable right” to the “pursuit of happiness” seems clear about the potential of everybody if given a real chance; it gives us all the benefit of the doubt. It seems to follow from this optimism that the way you judge whether an individual has in fact been allowed to exercise that right to pursue happiness is whether he or she has found a reasonable version of it.
And conversely, the Declaration seems to say, if too few are succeeding, if the number of wealthy is dwarfed by the number of miserably poor and insecure, if the rate of home ownership, long seen as a sign of people getting a real shot at happiness, is going down along with average income, it’s not because we the people have gotten stupider, less capable, less motivated to be happy (as Romney’s infamous 47% crack suggested). Rather, the system economic and political is not operating according to those founding principles.
A graduated income tax is an awkward way to make things right– levelling the playing field a bit, but only after the game is over. But it’s better than nothing.
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