How Unfair!

Here is a right wing economist, Gregory Mankiw, George Bush's head of the Council of Economic Advisors (yeah, the one that help set up The Great Recession!) pointing to a chart that "proves" that taxing the rich is just down right unfair. Take a look. It is "obvious"!


Look at those slackers in the lowest 20th percentile. They aren't paying any taxes! Why not? Oh, they don't even earn enough for food and shelter. Well, "fairness" means they should sell their children into slavery like in the "good old days" to make them pay their "fair share". That's the Greg Mankiw viewpoint as best I can tell.

Meanwhile, those poor people in Mankiw's favoured camp, the ones in the 95th to 99th percentile. Woe is them! Thes 4% segment of the population is earnly "only" 30% of all the income but they are being forced to pay 40% of the taxes. How "unfair"! It creates an obvious hardship. For example, consider this situation in Colorado (these numbers are WAGS -- wild ass guesses -- to make the point, they aren't accurate, only reasonable guesses):

• A big corporate CEO is making $200 million per year and is being forced to pay $50 million in taxes. This is a real hardship! The poor fellow has to make do on only $150 million per year.


• A minimum wage fellow earning the Colorado $7.24/hour with a wife and 4 kids. He works one regular job 40 hours per week, 52 weeks a year with no vacation making $15,059.20 and then works a temporary job for 10 hours a week 52 weeks a year at minimum wage to pull in another $3,764.80 for a grand total of $18,824. He pays some taxes, but mostly just FICA. He is left with $15,000 to feed, house, cloth, educate, etc. his family. Greg Mankiw thinks this slacker should pay maybe $3,000 more per year in taxes so that the burden can be lifted from the "oppressed" $200 million/year worker.

That is the vision of "fairness" of a right wing ideologue. Actually, a fairly mild ideologue (see here) compared to some real nut cases on the right who would diminish the relative taxes on the rich guy because "he is producing jobs" while increasing them even more on the poor fellow to punish him for "lack of initiative".

One gauge of who "progressive" the concept of a flat tax is can be obtained by looking at who practices this "innovative" and "progressive" thinking. Take a look here.

It is really simple to say "everybody should pay the same taxes". But if you go look in your Bible at a famous case where the judge, in this case Solomon, decided that everybody should share the burden equally and share the rewards equally -- the famous case of the two women claiming a right to an infant, and which Solomon "solved" by deciding to have the baby cut in half -- you get the idea of the idiocy of the "fairness" that the political Right in the US is demanding. Superficially it sounds "fair" but if you think about it, it is nutty.