September 30, 2010
It might be the case that you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, but the NYT is telling us that we need a philosopher to guide our tax policy. An article on the debate over extending the Bush tax cuts told readers:
“As the political battle drags on, however, it has also veered into a more basic matter of fairness, whether a person who earns more than $200,000 a year should be taxed at rates similar to those who make $5 million.”
Umm, really? Is the rate at which people are taxed, as opposed to the amount they pay in taxes, really such an important political issue? Do most people even know the rate at which they are taxed? Following the 1986 tax reform, tens of millions of middle income workers paid the same 28 percent tax rate as the very richest people in the country. There was not a big philosophical debate over this issue at that time. (We were lowering rates for the wealthy back then, not raising them.)
The more obvious issue is how much tax people will be paying. The answer for the questionably rich people who are the focus of this article (people with incomes between $250,000 and $500,000) is not very much. The Joint Tax Committee in Congress calculated that the average tax hit for taxpayers with income in this range would be $400 a year. That sort of tax hit would not seem to require very much philosophy.
Comments