Why Taxing the Rich Won’t Work
Ξ September 21st, 2011 | → Comments Off | ∇ Politics |
Over at the Atlantic, an associate editor named Daniel Indiviglio wrote a nice little story on why taxing the rich more won’t even begin to make a dent in our budgetary problems. He came up with this damning graph:
The red-line is the deficit for 2009. Each of the columns represent the amount of additional revenue raised if we increased the tax rate for those that earn over $1 million to those level, with a theoretical maximum of 100%, where all income is taken. Even is the US had no millionaires, and all income from those making over $999,999 was taken, we’d still be running a massive deficit. Or, put another way, if we had confiscated all that money, we still would have had a deficit larger than the previous three-years combined. That’s why the Tea Party pushed so hard on the debt-ceiling fight – because raising taxes for politicians is an easy thing to accomplish, but solves nothing. It doesn’t matter how helpful or well run a government program is if you can’t afford it. We obviously can’t afford the programs we’re paying for now, and so cuts need to be made.
Most Republicans privately acknowledge that tax increases will eventually be part of any solution. But we’ve been down the road of tax increases now for promised cuts down the road – the cuts never come, and the problem actually gets worse as politicians look for ways to spend the new revenue. Republicans, backed by the Tea Party elements, are now insisting on cuts first, and then followed by tax increases. Considering that we’ve gone from 60% of our GDP allocated to our national debt to 100% between 2007 and 2011, something needs to be done.
