Millionaires for Tax Increases
28th November 2010
An outfit called Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength has drawn the attention of the Wall Street Journal with a letter calling for a tax increase on those earning more than $1 million a year.
The Journal reporter asked a couple of the “patriotic millionaires” why they don’t just send in voluntary checks to the Treasury rather than trying to raise everyone’s taxes. One of them, Dennis Mehiel, responded, “Let’s carry this voluntary taxation argument to its conclusion. We already have a country like that, it’s called Greece. No one pays taxes in Greece. We’ve had a progressive income tax in the U.S. for decades and during that time we had a growing middle class and increased affluence and increase consumption. To say we should just write our own checks is a spurious argument. It’s catchy. But it has no validity in a substantial dialogue about public policy.”
But the American millionaires are not like Greeks who don’t pay taxes. In fact in 2007 the top 1% of taxpayers paid more than 40% of the federal income taxes, more than are paid by the bottom 95%. In 2008, the top 1 percent of tax returns paid 38.0 percent of all federal individual income taxes and earned 20.0 percent of adjusted gross income.
So either there’s something else going on here, or millionaires can be as stupid as anybody else. Which it is, is left as an exercise for the reader.
Mr. Mehiel ran for lieutenant governor of New York in 2002 and lost after a campaign full of mud-slinging.
My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.
There’s a certain asymmetry in this debate. The “Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength” get attention from the press, probably get invited to testify on Capitol Hill, see their names in the company of other famous and widely lauded people, and seem selfless. If some millionaires against tax increases were to start an organization called Patriotic Millionaires Against Coercion and Socialism, they’d get attacked as selfish, even though they’re not the ones trying to force their own values on others. The Patriotic Millionaires Against Coercion and Socialism, if they ever got started, would argue that they’d rather exchange the money voluntarily with their employees, their shareholders, their customers, or their charities than have it taken by force by the government.
‘Asymmetry’. What an anodyne name for it. I think the technical term in German is ‘einbahnstrasse’.