cognitive dissident

This Rockridge Institute essay on progressive taxation is a useful read for anyone bemoaning the presence of the IRS in our lives and wallets. Investment in infrastructure on a societal level is analogous to R&D expenditures on a corporate one: seemingly expensive in the short run, but a bargain over time:

America's government has at least two fundamental functions, protection and empowerment. Protection includes the police, firefighters, emergency services, public health, the military, and so on. Empowerment includes the infrastructure needed for business and everyday life: roads, communications systems, water supplies, public education, the banking system for loans and economic stability, the SEC for the stock market, the courts for enforcing contracts, air traffic control, support for basic science, our national parks and public buildings, and more. We are usually aware of protection. But the empowerment infrastructure, provided by taxes, is usually taken for granted, hidden, or ignored. Yet it is absolutely crucial, a fundamental truth about America and why America provides opportunity. [emphasis added]

The concept of progressive taxation is justified here:

The wealthy have made greater use of the common good—they have been empowered by it in creating their wealth—and thus they have a greater moral obligation to sustain it. They are merely paying their debt to society in arrears and investing in future empowerment.

This is the fundamental truth that motivates progressive taxation.

It is a truth that undercuts conservative arguments about taxation. Taxes provide and maintain the protecting and empowering infrastructure that makes our income possible.

Our tax forms hide this truth. They do not indicate the extent to which taxes have created and sustained the common wealth so you could earn what you have. They make it look like the empowering infrastructure was just put there by magic and that the government is taking money out of your pocket. The most likely truth is that, through the common wealth, America put more money in your pocket than it took out — by far.

Fred Thompson had a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, “Case Closed: Tax Cuts Mean Growth,” Thompson’s piece is summarized by P M Carpenter in “Thompson’s Thundering Thickness” as “frightening and pathetic -- laughably ahistorical but ominously effective. People actually buy this crap.” Carpenter’s piece concludes:

Thompson ends with this red baiting: "Are you really interested in tax rates that benefit the economy and raise revenue -- or are you interested in redistributing income for political reasons?" As I said earlier: frightening and pathetic.

But at least Fred Thompson does offer us a choice: Which would you like to see in a presidential candidate? Stunning ignorance or staggering effrontery? Well happy days and this year and next are your lucky ones, because he delivers both.

Phoenix Woman wages a personal “War on Bullshit” at FDL, referring to Thompson’s op-ed as “the vanguard of a renewed attempt to push this particular bullshit meme so hard and so often it becomes accepted as fact by the lazy.”

In light of the furor over taxes, my quote of the day comes from these words attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes:

"Taxes are the price we pay for civilization."

Thompson should think about that before issuing his next complaint.