The Nonexistent Case for Progressive Taxation
8th December 2015
George Will lays out some inconvenient truth.
Progressives are increasingly preoccupied with income inequality, and their current hero, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), favors increasing the tax system’s progressivity. So, in this 103rd year of the income tax, it is timely to note that there still is no intellectually sturdy case for progressive taxation.
Arguments for it are invariably arguments for increased equality of social outcomes. Because individuals have different vocational desires and different aptitudes for adding value to the economy, inequality is inevitable. Because individuals have different social sensibilities, opinions will differ about what degrees of inequality are intolerably unlovely (more about this aesthetic metric in a moment). But inequality, even when unlovely to some, is unjust only when it arises from unjust social arrangements. So, the degree to which inequality is morally troubling depends on the degree to which the process that allocates wealth does so according to political influence and rent-seeking rather than merit and self-reliance.
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Proportionate taxation always is what progressive taxation never is: simple. What justifies progressive taxation, and characterizes progressivism, is confidence that at any moment in society’s endless evolution, what is equitable can be known and society can be fine-tuned to achieve it. Which is how we got our baroque tax code.
Freeberg adds some additional insight:
There are people who hate money. No seriously. They bring it home, and figure the odds are stacked against them because after they’ve paid the essentials and made the minimum payments on the credit cards, which are maxed, there’s nothing. If this is ever discussed anywhere, it leads to some dirge about how the situation came to be, the high debt is the aftermath of some health crisis or what-not…but, nobody ever plotted a decent course forward by looking back at where he’d been. The real issue is that if the debt wasn’t high, they wouldn’t know what to do. If the debt was somehow gone tomorrow, and they had ten grand in the checking account, they wouldn’t see it as the end of a calamity but rather as the beginning of one. The money would represent an unfinished task, an unsolved problem.
Hand them $50, they start looking for things that cost $60. These are people who will never have money left at the end of the month. Ever. Because the simple fact of the matter is that isn’t what they want to have happen.