commissioner.org
| Source | Dave Anderson |
| Date | 02/04/24/02:42 |
| Comments on NY Times article on rightwing tax cutting by Tracy Mott,
professor of economics at the University of Denver ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sun, 21 Apr 2002 17:34:07 -0600 From: Tracy Mott I think that this issue is very important one. I think that taxing incomes does give a lot of ammunition to the tax cutters, flat taxers, etc. I have thought that perhaps taxing wealth would be easier to justify as representing an obligation on the part of the wealthy to pay for the protection society gives to personal wealth and the aid it gives to creating personal wealth, which is in large measure social wealth that is appropriated by individuals in accordance with some rather arbitrary rules about how the returns from using wealth to make more wealth are distributed and how wealth transfers are governed. The ownership of wealth is the major source of gaining more wealth, and the accumulation of wealth only may be the result of hard work and more often than not is simply the result of prior ownership of wealth. Taxing wealth is not taxing the income earned by those who do work hard or are born with or acquire valuable skills; it is only taxing what they have achieved to reduce the extra advantage to get future incomes or wealth that they or their descendants will have. If someone supports a lot of people out of his or her income or gives a lot of his or her income to worthy causes or dissipates his or her income in "riotous living" or "conspicuous consumption," he or she will automatically have less wealth to tax without having to claim deductions, etc. Whatever incentive this might create against saving as opposed to spending one's income I think would be small because the desire to have wealth would outweigh the cost of the tax payments, and high spending would keep employment, wages, and profits all higher than they otherwise would be. Taxing wealth would generate the same government revenue as income taxes with quite lower rates, and a flat percentage tax rate on wealth would actually make the tax system a lot more progressive in terms of incomes than it now is. And, if you wanted to exempt owner-occupied housing or family farms from the wealth tax base (or leave them for the local governments' sources of revenue) or grant businesses an investment tax credit for plant and equipment spending to support increases in productivity, you could do that. So, I think this agrees with the arguments made by the reviewer of the book mentioned below. Tracy ANDERSON DAVID wrote: > The Myth of Ownership': Challenging the Rhetoric of Tax Cutting > http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/21/books/review/21JOHNSTT.html > > By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON > > THE MYTH OF OWNERSHIP: Taxes and Justice. > By Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel. > 228 pp. New York: Oxford University Press. $25. |
Copyright (c) 1998, Joongpil Cho