Tag: over-taxation

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general freedom national politics & policies tax policy

The Taker’s Gift

The Tax Trick

Say a mugger robs Ed instead of you. Has the mugger given you a present of your stuff by not taking it? Is his non-​taking a “giveaway”?

No. If you possess something you have honestly earned, it is yours by right, not as a special gift from each person who abstains from relieving you of it.

Why is this not just as true when the prospective stuff-​taker is a government?

Whatever case may be made for taxing you to fund a governmental goal, the state is not “giving” you whatever part of your wealth it lets you keep.

Yet this is the claim that partisans of big government repeatedly make. They apparently aim to undermine any hint of willingness to let us keep more of what belongs to us.

We see it again in the context of President Obama’s recent attacks on the plan of some Republicans to do away with estate taxes, the notorious “death taxes.” This tax relief would allegedly be a “giveaway” to those who have worked most successfully to earn something worth leaving to people they care about. It would also allegedly “deprive” non-​recipients of some government handout no longer fundable because of the tax cut.

Being taxed less is always about keeping more of your own money and being able to spend it as you wish, including on heirs.

That’s a feature of tax cuts — not a bug.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Categories
tax policy too much government

Tax the Poor!

There is an argument for taxing the poor. Net beneficiaries of taxation can think about government in a different way than net payers. They might begin to think like children, not like adult supporters of a shared enterprise in defense of the basic institutional framework that in turn supports civilization.

If Americans still took seriously the old republican idea of “no taxation without representation,” some might scandalously invert the mantra as “no franchise without net tax payment,” thus excluding all net tax consumers (politicians, subsidized poor and subsidized business folk) from voting. But that does seem outrageous.

It’s also unworkable. At some point of complexity, calculating net winners and net losers becomes impossible.

Democrats have happily added to that complexity. One odd wrinkle? They’ve so indiscriminately increased the number of taxes in Obamacare (twenty-​one!) that they have seemingly taken up the cause of taxing the poor. “Even the lowest income families (earning less than about $19,000 in 2012) will be on the hook,” writes Chris Connover in Forbes, “for nearly $7,000 in Obamacare taxes over the decade that started last year.”

Of course, the poor aren’t the only to pay more under Obamacare. Connover estimates that those in the “top 2 percent” will “end up paying $177,000 over the same decade.”

None of this suggests to me that the net effect of Obamacare will be positive. It’s basically just another hyper-​intrusive, reality-​distorting government program that will make services more expensive in toto, providing a huge drag on medicinal progress as well.

Impoverishing most of us, along with “the poor.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.