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Erik Hare

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Blogs by Erik Hare

Taxing
4/16/2008 5:11:46 AM

I finished my taxes, barely on time. The last minute rush to get them in is a feature of life in the USofA; even if you got yours done early, you hear a lot of carping from the many procrastinators around you.

Through the last generation or so, since Reagan was elected, people in the US have supported candidates who promise to lower their taxes. John McCain just took a page from this by calling for a holiday from the gas tax from Memorial Day to Labor Day. There are certainly many people who think this is a good idea, but I don’t believe that most people want it to go that far.

Consider for a moment that in 2006 there was $7,821 billion in total household income in the US – that is, people of this nation (not corporations) pulled in over 7 trillion bucks in salaries, dividends, and whatever else we could hustle. On that money, we paid the Feds $1,044 billion or about 13% overall. That’s not that much when you think of how expensive it is to run a Federal Government.

Why do we complain, then? I think it’s because the tax code is so complicated that we can all honestly believe that someone else is getting away with something you aren’t. Think back to everyone in the office (or wherever) talking about their taxes and what they were doing at the last minute. Weren’t there many things that you wish you had done? Wasn’t there a new wrinkle you didn’t consider? It’s hard to get too mad at friends or colleagues who are just getting their own, but at some point it becomes obvious that you could have gotten away with less if you really wanted.

I’m a Democrat. A liberal, if you must. I don’t think that we pay all that much in taxes when you look at the final numbers. But the way we pay them has to be a solid Democrat kind of issue. We can use that as a way to break off the “I’m getting screwed” people from the “I hate all taxes” crowd.

How can we do this? I’m going to give you an extreme example, and we’ll go from there. Many people have talked about a flat tax, where there is one rate for everything. Most of the people who have come up with plans, such as Steve Forbes or Sam Brownback, fudged the numbers to include a massive tax cut in the process. I just want to talk about getting the same trillion buck out of a simple way to do it.

If we just taxed all income flat, that’d give us the same 13% overall rate. That’s variable one. The problem is that we need another variable in the system to have some progressive equity in the system; it’s just not fair to tax money that goes to the basic cost of life in the USofA as we would money that might go for luxuries. If we exempted the poverty line, which is about $10k per person from taxes, and only taxed the rest, we’d have a rate of 22% on the remainder. That’s two variables, and we already have a more progressive system than we do now, plus a lower marginal rate. The mythical family of four earning the median income of $48.2k would pay only $1,765 in taxes.

With only two variables, instead of the thousands we have now, we can construct a system that is much harder to tweak and far more progressive. Yes, the capital gains tax would rise from the current 15%, but so what? No one has really proven that this rate significantly changes the level of investment.

The bottom line is that if you treat all income the same and only have as many variables as you absolutely have to, people will understand their tax system and not think they are getting screwed. That’s what is important in a representative democracy. The absolute level of taxes isn’t that terrible, but how we get there is. The left would be wise to take this issue on.

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