Anti-Climacus

QUOTE: Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but is Jonah Goldberg (who advocated carpet-bombing Canada last week in NR) saying that progressive taxation might not be completely evil?

"By far, the most common objection from readers involves the ever-growing size of the federal government and the ever-increasing amounts of money it takes from us. Depending on where you live, you can go well into the month of May, in effect, working for the government because citizens (or I should say many citizens) are paying somewhere between 40 percent and 50 percent of their incomes in taxes. Do I think this is outrageous? Yes. Do I think it is counterproductive? Yes. Do I think we would be freer and the country would be better off if we cut those taxes? Absolutely. Do I think we have become less free because of those taxes? Well? yes and no.

Imagine if, starting tomorrow, every American citizen made a minimum of $1 million a year. If the federal government took 50 percent of your income, you'd still have $500,000 per year. So while, yes, that's an outrageous tax rate and, yes, you'd be more free if the government took "merely" 40 percent ? or better yet 5 percent ? you would still be more wealthy than you'd have been if you only made $100,000 a year. In principle, i.e., for the purposes of this discussion, the share of your wealth taken by the government is not as relevant as the question of how wealthy you've become.

Now, obviously, we're not all millionaires. But we are all ? and that includes the poor ? much, much wealthier than we were in grandpa's day. Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation crunched the numbers in the 2001 Census last year and found that, "Today, the typical American defined by the government as poor has a car, air conditioning, a refrigerator, a stove, a VCR, a microwave, a stereo, and a color TV. He is able to obtain medical care. His home is in good repair and is not over-crowded . . ." Meanwhile, 41 percent of "poor" people in America own their own homes. And, today, adjusted for inflation, "expenditures per person among the poorest fifth of households equal those of the average household in the early 1970s." [my emphasis]"