Taxing Issues

Oliver Wendell Homes, Jr., The great Justice -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
With only 3 days to the election, realclearpolitics.com is showing Obama with an average 6.8 lead, across all the major polls. With all the hullabaloo, I’m reminded of a 1990 Robin Williams movie, Awakenings. The movie isn’t particularly great or note-worthy except that the current election scene brings it to mind. In Awakenings, patients in long-term encephalitic comas are brought back to consciousness by a new miracle drug. They take up mentally where they left off when the disease robbed them of consciousness.

I feel as if the United States has been in such a coma since 1980. The Clinton years are a “one-off” – Clinton was a Southern bubba who actually kowtowed to a Republican congress by enacting such things as Don’t-ask-don’t-tell and the Defense of Marriage Act. To be fair, his Democratic administration was still good in that it was like a truly moderate Republican term – balancing the budget and engendering a financial boom period.

America is a political anomaly – the poor and lower middle class in the U.S. will actually vote against their economic interests to bolster social issues such as abortion or gay marriage. In Europe and Latin America, these issues receive separate treatment – social and financial conservatism are not commingled. Middle-class Europeans are more inclined to vote for social Democratic (big government) parties. It’s outrageous that so many wealthy American individuals and corporations are able to shelter their income so completely from taxation. This shield is provided by the great swirl of the middle class who vote as if they were in the shelter class.

This week’s TIME magazine has an Op Ed piece about the laughability of deriding taxes as the “redistribution of wealth”. In point of fact taxes are a redistribution of wealth – a healthy and necessary redistribution. As Oliver Wendell Homes said, “Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society”. A favorite conservative argument is, “I should only be taxed for what I use, or what is of merit to me”. Well, that is pretty much roads, highways, airports, postal delivery, school, research & development, national defense and virtually every non-direct-market human activity. The wealth is indeed taken and redistributed – without this we would devolve to feudal states with toll roads, tariffs and jousting matches between Machiavellian city-states.

A tax must be levied, and a graduated income tax is the fairest way to assess the dues. As America loses ground to BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China), it may finally have another Great Awakening – it should awaken to the fact that great societies must sometimes engage in great collective enterprises, and taxes, fairly assessed and collected, are the only known way (here or anywhere) to accomplish that.

© 2008 blogSpotter