Comments on: Family activist slams Perry’s flat tax plan over marriage

By: MikeM

MikeM — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 05:44:52 +0000

fma,
Your comments are totally contrary the available data. The top 80% of American society has remarkable class mobility. The rich do not necessarily stay rich, and the middle class do not necessarily stay middle class. There’s very high mobility among those classes, with many getting richer and many getting poorer.

It is true that within the bottom quintile of the income distribution, there’s fairly low mobility. But, that doesn’t stretch to the rest of Americans. We probably need to address the persistent lack of mobility among the poorest Americans, but if we ignore the facts and misdiagnose the problem, we can’t do that.

By: Darren

Darren — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 23:30:43 +0000

A flat tax holds great appeal to me in that it would remove a great deal of the government’s ability to try to socially engineer behavior via tax breaks. That’s one reason it would never be passed by any Congress. They won’t want to lose that control.

But all this tinkering on the revenue side misses the larger point. By allowing themselves to be distracted by the revenue side of the equation (even if from the opposite end of the spectrum as Democrats), Republicans are ignoring the real issue that has to be addressed in any meaningful reform: spending. Without cutting spending, all the tax fiddling will be meaningless.

By: Joe M

Joe M — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 22:46:39 +0000

Louis. Two points: A) A flat sales tax is also progressive as people with more money also spend more. B) Is it keeping with Catholic thought to insult people by calling them embarrassingly amateurish?

By: fma

fma — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 22:18:33 +0000

There is very little class mobility in the United States. The rich stay rich, the middle class stays the middle class and the poor stay poor. So do their children. The very few people that change classes usually move down, not up. Hence the reason that over the past decade the poorest Americans have steadily increased in numbers while the middle class has shrunk.

By: MikeM

MikeM — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 07:54:13 +0000

If we’re chained to the idea of not raising taxes a penny on the middle or lower classes, we can’t have any meaningful tax reform. If you look at the ratio of our taxes on the rich to those on the rest of the income distribution, we already have by far the most progressive tax system in the world.

Our income inequality problem, to the extent that we have one, has little, if anything, to do with our income tax structure. We need a tax code that encourages economic growth, and we won’t get there if we treat this as a zero sum game among the tax brackets.

By: Louis

Louis — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 03:07:17 +0000

I’d like to like this blog, as the post about Limbaugh was well thought out and very straightforward, but this post gives me pause.
I find it hard to believe that in the space of two sentences you completely contradict yourself in such an embarrassingly amateurish fashion.
I’m speaking, of course, to the part where you decry a flat tax as unjust because there are no breaks for families, and yet declare those who believe in a progressive tax (they very tax structure you just endorsed) as Leftist, and somehow not in keeping with Catholic thought.
A tax that removes the burden from those struggling poor or families is by its very nature progressive, as a flat tax treats everyone the same regardless of circumstance… So either you are for a progressive tax and contradicted yourself, or you are merely spouting a poorly thought out quasi-Republican talking point and are trying to reconcile it with a viewpoint that places yourself above others.(families are the only institutions worthy of tax breaks!).

By: Joe M

Joe M — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 20:52:00 +0000

Perry’s version is strange with the option, etc. However, I disagree with Mr. Ponnuru’s position as well. — I think that we have perhaps been mesmerized by years of class warfare rhetoric into thinking that the middle class is a sacred cow. That they are always different people than the upper or lower class. This is because class warfare logic only really works if you’re analyzing people as if time were frozen and people don’t move between groups more often than they stay in one their entire lives. Considering the reality of economic mobility, raising taxes on “the” middle class is more like asking people to chip in with taxes at a certain phase of their lives. — We can make it a rule to place as much tax burden on wealthy incomes as humanly possible. However, people in the middle class will feel economic problems just the same through avenues other than taxes (unemployment, inflation, rising prices, lowering salaries, unavailable credit, etc.). It’s a shell game to consider tax policy as if that is the barometer for how well off different groups of people are going to be over time. — Mr. Ponnuru says that it’s impossible to keep revenue the same without raising taxes on the middle class. I’m not sure if that is truly a supportable claim. However, assuming that it is, I would argue that would be more in line with Catholic Social teaching that each person is due payment as merited by their work. Our current tax structure says that the more successful a person is, the less payment they are allowed for the same work. I believe that there is evidence that a flat tax structure would solve a lot of the non-tax ailments that we face, making the US once again a more desirable place to set up business, creating jobs, lowering prices. — As far as the argument goes that treating people as individuals rather than couples for taxes: I think that if a couple is getting married for a tax break or that they can’t remain married unless they receive a tax break, something much more substantial is wrong with that picture than the tax code itself.