Taxation and Equality

So I understand that if you had a $300 tax that everyone was required to pay that it would effect people differently. People with less income would struggle with it, while those who were well off could pay it without batting an eyelid.

This is presented as regressive and "unfair." So the next argument goes that we should then charge a percentage. Lets say that everyone pays 5 percent... is that fair? Then we realize that for people struggling to survive 5 percent of their income could be the difference between them surviving or not surviving. While 5 percent of those with more income might not even effect them at all. One less trip per year on the private jet or something of that sort.

What does that leave us with. The response is that we should break income up into brackets and charge different rates for the different levels, the lowest level owing no tax and the highest level paying the largest percentage. Still people cry foul. This may help the poorest people but it leaves the middle class with a very high tax burden, while the richest still barely break a sweat with their "percentage."

At some point we have to realize that this whole process is insane. We would think it was horribly unfair and unreasonable to treat people differently under the law if they were of lower income, so why is it okay to treat people with more money that way.

Will we be better off if everyone has equal difficulty or ease paying taxes and how could you objectively determine that. I dispute the idea that if someone has more money than they could ever spend that they should therefore be carrying the rest of us on their shoulders.

Equality before the law means that you should not get to determine how to treat people based upon their socioeconomic status. We seem to spend a great deal of time in this country trying to make things "more equal." But that generally amounts to taking more and more and more money from those that have it to give it to those that do not have it.

Why is that equality? The person having their money taken is not being treated equally. The person who receives the money is not being treated equally before the law. Rather the legal system becomes an explicit system to create and maintain in-equal treatment. This is done in the name of "leveling the playing field."

The trouble is that it is never successful, and no amount of money ever seems to be enough. I have heard it said that the top 5 percent of income earners should have to give all of their money to the government. How could that be fair? And why would anyone continue to work if the government were taking that much of their money?

I think we should stop worrying about someone's difficulty to pay or not pay once they get higher than a certain income. Already someone who pays 5 percent of a million dollars is paying far more of "their fair share." Than someone who pays 5 percent of $100,000.

What I don't understand is why we have taxes at all. I don't know if anyone else has noticed but the IRS is a really nasty institution. Our income tax code is something like 2000 pages long, and every year we pay accountants billions of dollars to figure out and file our taxes for us.

How is it that we cannot come up with a more efficient system than this?

Taxation is inherently bureaucratic and therefore inefficient. Its enforcement is inherently violent. In this day and age we cannot come up with a better system for funding our government and public services... really? And yet most of the government is funded on bonds, and invisible taxes like taxes on gas and airlines.

So already we see that there are other ways just within the realm of what is happening now. But we are supposed to believe that these are inadequate by themselves in spite of the fact that the budget grows every year.

If we merely went back in time during my own lifetime (I'm 29) we could find national budgets that could be easily covered today without the use of an income tax. Forget about regressive, progressive etc. We should be working to figure out how to get rid of taxes entirely.

The best way to do that is by privatizing and deregulating services that the government does not need to be doing. Social security is at the top of my list, and then the school system. Follow it with medicare.

It was this idea that it was okay to tax the income of the top 5 percent that got us into our current tax regime.

The 16th amendment was sold to america on the grounds that only top income earners would be taxed and that it would be a very small percentage of their income 1-5 percent. Promises were made that the rest of us would never be taxed. Yet by the 60's not only was almost everyone being taxed but that top bracket was paying something like 90 percent of their income into the government.

Say what you will about Reagan, but I firmly believe he took the U.S. in a positive direction so far as reducing the tax burden, and deregulation is concerned.

My argument is that we should stop worrying about what the richest of the rich are doing, making, or paying. Instead let us figure out how to start removing the income tax from our nation entirely.