With the public unconvinced of the wisdom of soaking the rich, the latest hot idea floating around in statist circles is not to soak the rich, but rather the really, super-duper, ultra rich.
In a class-warfare filled screed, James Surowiecki wrote in the New Yorker on the need to “Soak the Very, Very Rich.”
A better tax system would have more brackets, so that the super-rich pay higher rates. (The most obvious bracket to add would be a higher rate at a million dollars a year, but there’s no reason to stop there.) This would make the system fairer, since it would reflect the real stratification among high-income earners…
Ezra Klein then blogged at the Washington Post that he is “very sympathetic to the idea that there should be more tax brackets,” reasoning that “It would be a lot easier to fight the super-rich than to fight the super-rich, the really rich, the pretty rich, and well-off.” If there was a bracket just for the super-duper-really rich, you see, it could be more easily raised to unconscionable and economy killing levels without public objection.
Adding more tax brackets would complicated an already inexcusably incomprehensible tax code, resulting in increased economic waste and compliance costs, more expenditures on lobbying and even greater uncertainty than is currently holding down economic growth.
Furthermore, tax policy should not be decided based on which group is easiest to demagogue and demonize. Nor is it the purpose of the tax code to enshrine into law a particular view of economic fairness, which in the case of Surowiecki and Klein, means redistribution.
There is one legitimate reason and one legitimate reason only for taxes, and that’s to raise the funds necessary for the limited functions of constitutional government and rule of law. There is no honest assessment of those functions as enshrined in the US Constitution which can find that the present revenues received by the state are insufficient to provide for those functions.
I’m sure it’s too much to ask, but rather than ruminate on which of its citizens the government and its statist boosters should declare war on next, the Ezra Klein’s of the world should think about how government spending can be reduced, and our federal government brought back into the bounds of legitimate, constitutional governance.
