It’s April. Tax month.
Americans are notoriously anti-tax. (In fact, “tax” may be the only four-letter word that only has three letters). I’m no different; it’s April, and I’ve reluctantly remitted what I owed, while thinking about all the other things I could do with those dollars. But I also know that reaction is intellectually indefensible, because taxes pay for the kind of world rational humans want to inhabit.
Taxes are the dues we pay for living in a civilized society.
Those well-to-do people protesting their tax burdens would never treat their country clubs and other membership organizations the way they treat/cheat their governments. (How would the Orange Menace react iff Mar-A-Lago members declined to pay their dues?) Those manicured golf courses need tending. The clubhouse roofs and mechanical systems require maintenance. The properly servile “help” won’t be there to bring you your Scotch and soda if they aren’t being paid. Etc.
The people who presumably understand the need to pay dues adequate to keep their clubs and organizations functioning need to acknowledge that–as members of the polity–they have similar obligations to their country.
I think we all agree that government should be efficient–that our tax dollars shouldn’t pay for (frequently hypothesized) “fraud and waste.” And it’s entirely legitimate to argue about whether we really need this or that government program. Most legislative efforts to ease the tax burdens of wealthy folks, however, are based on justifications that have consistently proved to be unfounded.
A recent article from Governing analyzed the effects of two decades of tax cuts in Ohio.
Tax reform is a politically charged issue, with conservatives saying lower income taxes help drive economic prosperity, and progressives saying tax cuts have functioned as handouts to the rich, while defunding crucial public services.
Despite those stark differences, both right- and left-leaning groups who spoke to cleveland.com said the impact of Ohio’s income tax cuts on the state economy overall throughout the past 20 years has been minimal.
“The theory behind it is that cutting these taxes will spur on extra growth and get extra investment,” said Jonathan Ernest, an assistant professor of economics at Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management. “You would expect after some number of years to start seeing growth, and we haven’t necessarily seen that.”
Ohio’s experience is not an anomaly, but–as with so many other elements of our highly politicized policy process–evidence has been swamped by ideology.
We need to see the majority of anti-taxation arguments for what they really are: rejections of the importance–or even the existence– of the common good, and a disinclination to help maintain important social goods accessible to their fellow citizens. (Let’s call that disinclination what it is: selfish. It isn’t “self-interested,” because genuine, long-term self-interest requires the maintenance of a stable, flourishing society–and highly unequal societies are notoriously unstable.)
Anti-tax Republicans push back against progressives who want to move the U.S. policy in the direction of Scandinavian countries–despite the fact that those countries score far higher on measures of happiness and social cohesion– by warning against “confiscatory” tax rates.
Actually,despite the mythology, Scandanavian taxes aren’t much higher than our own, once we combine Americans’ local, state and federal burdens–and their citizens get much more value for their money, including relief from the enormous costs of higher education and health care.
As the author of the linked article wrote,
US critics say that Swedes pay 56 percent — so the government takes over half of your money. This is not true — 56 percent is the marginal tax rate, i.e. what high earners pay on income over a certain amount in both state and local taxes. Only 15 percent of Swedes pay tax at this rate. It turns out the average Swede pays less than 27 percent of his or her income in direct taxes. As I’ve written elsewhere, my wife and I pay about 22 percent of our US income in taxes. Our Swedish income tax was 31 percent. So, yes, our income taxes in Sweden were higher than in the US, but we still paid less than one-third in tax.
And you get far more for your taxes than you do in the US. In Sweden, college is free and students get a housing stipend….
The 33 million Americans who are still not covered by health insurance don’t have much choice when they get sick, unless you think, “Your money or your life?” is a choice. Paradoxically it turns out the bloated, heavily lobbied, privatized US system spends more tax money ($4,437) per person than Sweden’s socialized health care ($3,184).
Eradicating medical and educational debt would do a lot more to boost America’s economy than adding tax loopholes for the wealthy.
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