Because of the way it massively extracts taxes from the top 50 percent of earners and redistributes the benefits to every class of people, to be sure, but disproportionately to the poorest who pay nothing in federal taxes. They number in excess of 63 million tax filers.
So why can't Bruce Bartlett, here, just say that?
"Perhaps the right and left can at least agree that it is unseemly for those in the top 1 percent of income distribution, with incomes at least 10 times the median income, to pay no federal income taxes. It’s not socialism to ask them to pay something."
"Unseemly"? We're talking 24,000 filers in the top 1 percent. Why isn't it unseemly, and in fact a scandal, that over 5 times as many people in the lowest two quintiles pay no federal income taxes than in the highest three quintiles?
Bartlett well knows that the rich who pay no federal taxes may in fact pay capital gains taxes, and may also be massively financing America's municipalities in the bond market to escape federal taxes, just as he knows the poor who work pay Social Security taxes just like everyone else who works.
That's the problem with the tax code. It's balkanized and hyphenated, just like America, and when only looking at one part of it and from that perspective, it only provokes judgments as distorted as the code itself.
A tax code which taxed all income in all forms and at all levels without exception and at one low rate would go a long way to repairing the divisions in this country.
Unfortunately we don't have very many people in leadership advocating for this.
From the article:
So why can't Bruce Bartlett, here, just say that?
"Perhaps the right and left can at least agree that it is unseemly for those in the top 1 percent of income distribution, with incomes at least 10 times the median income, to pay no federal income taxes. It’s not socialism to ask them to pay something."
"Unseemly"? We're talking 24,000 filers in the top 1 percent. Why isn't it unseemly, and in fact a scandal, that over 5 times as many people in the lowest two quintiles pay no federal income taxes than in the highest three quintiles?
Bartlett well knows that the rich who pay no federal taxes may in fact pay capital gains taxes, and may also be massively financing America's municipalities in the bond market to escape federal taxes, just as he knows the poor who work pay Social Security taxes just like everyone else who works.
That's the problem with the tax code. It's balkanized and hyphenated, just like America, and when only looking at one part of it and from that perspective, it only provokes judgments as distorted as the code itself.
A tax code which taxed all income in all forms and at all levels without exception and at one low rate would go a long way to repairing the divisions in this country.
Unfortunately we don't have very many people in leadership advocating for this.
From the article:
