Why ‘Tax the Rich’ Demands Are So Unreasonable
15th April 2019
Jonah Goldberg belabors the obvious for people who need that.
If I told you there was a movement to create a navy or an air force, you might respond, “Don’t we already have those?” If I said we need a movement to persuade bears to relieve themselves in the woods, you might say, “Wait. Isn’t that happening already?”
But if I said we needed to tax the rich, a lot of people’s first reaction would be, “Yes! It’s about time!”
In fact, there’s an astroturf movement based on precisely this notion. There was just a big conference, fittingly named the “Tax the Rich!” conference, hosted by a group called Patriotic Millionaires.
“Tax the Rich. Save America. Yes, it really is that simple,” they explain in their mission statement.
This slogan is simply dishonest; rich people do, in fact, pay taxes. Just under half (48 percent) of federal revenue comes from income taxes. If you define the rich as the top 1 percent — which is probably too narrow, depending on the region of the country — the rich pay a big chunk of that. In 2016, according to the Tax Foundation, the top 1 percent accounted for 37.3 percent of all income-tax revenue, a share that was greater than the bottom 90 percent of all payers of income tax combined. The top half of taxpayers paid 97 percent of income taxes.