Excellent post, jshore.
I was going to respond to Brutus but I have nothing left to say. Kudos on your anaysis.
I’m not sure I follow you at all here. I realize that sales taxes and property taxes are paid by everyone. And I understand that sales taxes paid by poor people are a bigger portion of thier own income. Bu I’m not sure how this translates to the point you are making. How is it that the executive only pays 10% taxes through other means? Presumably he uses the portion of his income which is not taxed to buy things or invest. Does he not pay taxes on those transactions? Property taxes are percentages of the value of the property. Yet you seem to imply that rich people pay less in property tax than poor people do.
I agree that Republicans often mislead by confusing averages with dollar amounts. But I think liberals do the same when they conflate tax rates and percentages of income.
BTW, can you give me a summary of what CTJ means by “effective tax rates.”?
Let me ask you 1 more thing. If rich people pay a larger portion of the total taxes recieved should they not recieve a larger portion of any tax cut? Under these circumstances isn’t it better to characterize the tax cut as a failure to distribute wealth rather than an actual distribution of wealth?
I am, of course, not considering whether a tax cut is a good idea at all.
Ok, but how is the total amount of tax collected distributed. How much is collected by sales, property, and income taxes. And how is that amount distributed amongst the different income ranges.
Let me ask you guys this way. If we completely revamped the tax system where would you want the cuttof to be. Should the top 50% of earners pay for the govenrment? The top 25%? or should most of the money come from the top 2 or 3%?
I don’t have time now to respond to each reply made by some of you to my various posts, I’ll get to that later, but I will just say this.
I find it funny that those of you replied to the points I made automatically assumed that I believed everything that I posted. I never stated my positions one way or the other. I was giving the usual reasons that some associate Liberalism with Communism.
As for what I believe and what I use to defend my positions, I’ll get into that later. But for now, I will say this, I do believe that it is kind of harsh to call Liberals Communists.
Well, obviously, my example was just a hypothetical example, so I can’t vouch for the total realism of the numbers. The 10 and 15% numbers for the cuts were at least approximately grabbed off of what the Bush Treasury Department put out. As for the 10% other taxes on the rich guy, okay, when I originally dreamed up this argument, I think I was imagining talking only about federal taxes only…So, I was imagining a rich guy who paid 90% of his taxes through the income tax and 10% through the payroll tax. This is in fact quite easy to imagine since most of the payroll tax cuts out after about $90,000 of income and it only applies to wage income anyway.
If we are considering all taxes, it might be a bit more difficult to come up with an example where 90% of the taxes a rich person pays are federal income taxes…but it probably wouldn’t be hard for it to be 75-80%, so if it makes you happier you can downgrade the percentage decrease in his total tax burden from my 9% estimate to 7.5 or 8%.
As for your specific questions about investments and property taxes: Income on investments are taxed as part of the personal income tax. And, yes, rich people pay property taxes and their properties tend to be more expensive but, as the CTJ Minnesota example shows, they tend to pay a lesser percent of income in property taxes than poor people do. I guess this means that the value of their property doesn’t tend to scale up with income on a linear basis. For sale taxes, this is definitely true…I.e., people with high incomes do not spend proportionally higher on goods. They tend to invest or save a good portion of their money and they also tend to spend a larger fraction of their money on non-taxable services.
[quote
But I think liberals do the same when they conflate tax rates and percentages of income.[/quote]
I lost you here. What are liberals conflating exactly?
My interpretation would be that they figure out the total amount the person earning that amount pays in each tax (on average) and divide by the person’s income. That gives the effective rate. (In some cases, I believe there might be some effective assigning of taxes…e.g., they might assign property taxes to the renters rather than the landlord, although I am by no means sure whether or not they do that.)
Well, obviously one can debate whether or not this should be the case. But, my whole point is that the rich are getting an amount back which is out of proportion with the larger portion that they are paying if you consider the tax burden as a whole (or even only the federal tax burden as a whole) rather than only the federal income tax burden. If each person was getting back, say a 5% rebate on their total tax burden then this tax cut would be neither regressive or progressive in the sense that it would leave the overall tax structure just as progressive or regressive as it was before. However, in the Bush tax cuts, the rich are getting a larger percentage rebate of their total tax burden than the poor are. This means the tax structure as a whole is becoming less progressive.
Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, of course, is the subject of debate. But, I think first it is important to establish what is in fact happening with these tax cuts. (I would personally argue that it is a bad thing given the incredible increases in real income, measured either pre- or post-tax that the wealthiest have experienced…from like 1980-1997, the number is something like a 150% [i.e., factor of 2.5] increase in real terms while the gain for those with median incomes has been much, much smaller [about 10%, as I recall]. At a time when essentially all the gains in the economy are going to a select few who already were doing quite dandy, I would argue that a tax cut that cuts these folks taxes proportionally greater than everyone else’s is quite nutty. We should be trying to figure out why the rising tide barely seems to be lifting most boats rather than focussing on helping those whose boats have been lifted to the stratosphere. There are, by the way, people who are debating this and there is by no means a consensus…Some argue that it is structural changes in the economy. [And, within these camp, some say that market economics is working and others that there are market failures leading to income inequality that is in fact counterproductive to economic growth. Others argue that it is due much more to economic policy…ranging from “trickle-down economics” policies to tight monetary policy. )
Well, that is a complicated question. I have provided links that show share data for the federal income tax and I have also provided links that show data in terms of effective tax rates (but not share data) for various state taxes on a state-by-state basis. There have been studies, most notably by the Congressional Budget Office, that try to estimate share data for all federal taxes rather than just the income tax. Here is a link that will at least get you into that study. It is pretty long and gory and detailed and they measure the share data in about 100 different ways (okay, maybe not 100 but close), although the results don’t seem to vary that dramatically with method.
Well, this question points out an interesting conundrum. I believe that the Wall Street Journal editorial page is not incorrect in their concern that an increasingly large proportion of the taxes are paid by a small proportion of the highest-income people, even if they tend to considerably exagerate this effect by focussing almost exclusively on share data for the federal income tax only. Unfortunately, they don’t look at the data closely enough to diagnose why this shift has occurred. They imply that it is due to a “steeply progressive” tax structure. However, the reality is that
(1) The tax structure is not all that steeply progressive if you look at the entire tax burden or even just the entire federal tax burden rather than just the federal income tax. Also, the Wall Street Journal editorial page has the annoying habit of quoting only share-of-tax data and claiming that this alone demonstrates progressivity when it does not. For example, they’ll say that the fact that the top 1% of earners paid 34% of the federal income tax in 2001 shows that the income tax is steeply progressive when in fact that number shows a combination of a steep inequality in income (where the top 1% earn 17.5% of the AGI) with a moderately progressive federal income tax. [In other words, even if the income tax structure were completely “flat”, the top 1% would still have to pay 17.5% of the income tax because that is their share of the income.] The difference between the 17.5% of the income and the 34% of the federal income tax paid becomes less dramatic if you look instead at total federal tax and would become even less dramatic if you factored in state and local tax burdens.
(2) The reason for the shift in the share burden for the richest 1% has absolutely nothing to do with an increase in progressiveness of the tax structure which hasn’t occurred (except maybe at the very bottom end of the structure with the earned income tax credit). Rather, this increase in the share that the rich pay is accounted for by the dramatic increase in the share of the income that they earn. A look at the Tax Foundation charts makes that very clear. We see that the oft-quoted statistic that the share of the federal income tax paid by the top 1% just about doubled from 19% to 37.4% between 1980 and 2000. But, we also see that the share of the income [as measured by AGI which may not be the best thing to use but seems to be the best we have] went from 8.5% to 20.5%…or in other words went up by nearly a factor of 2.5.
So, I don’t think there is any easy answer to your question but the first thing to do is to correctly diagnose the reason for the increase in the proportion of the tax burden being borne by the rich. And, the reason for this is simply the huge explosion in income inequality.
People forget that the God of Liberalism himself, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was the fellow who saved capitalism from going under. Saved free enterprise and the American way of life for the conservatives to continue enjoying it.
There were so many desperately poor people during the Depression that Communism was beginning to catch on in America, and would have led to a serious disruption of the system if FDR hadn’t ameliorated the suffering. Call it “capitalism with a human face” (to paraphrase Alexander Dubcek).
Bob Dylan, in his song “Talkin’ New York,” had some telling lines. He was inspired by Woody Guthrie’s advocacy for the poor during the Depression…
A lot of folks ain’t got nothin’ to eat,
But they got a lot of forks and knives,
And they gotta cut somethin’.
Well, okay, but the way you phrased the arguments implied that you either believed that liberals were guilty of such things as “promot[ing] class warfare” or you are just very good at expressing the arguments of conservatives who you disagree with.
The fact that you ended your post with “Yes, this may sound pretty harsh…I think I hit the nail on the head” further implied to me that you had sympathy with the characterizations of liberals that you expressed, although I suppose other interpretations of your words are possible.
[I did not interpret it to mean that you completely bought into Liberalism=Communism but that you did seem sympathetic to the characterizations of liberalism that you expressed and my belief is that these characterizations are already quite off-base.]
Here is a cite for this data (which also provides a few other interesting facts). The actual years were 1979-1997. I believe it has been pointed out elsewhere that the lower and median income folks did finally make some better gains in real income in the 1997 to 2000 timeframe when the economy really caught fire and the labor market became very tight, although obviously nothing to nearly make up the differential that I talked about. Also, I don’t know how much the current recession has erased those gains or whether such data is even available yet.
jshore Thanks. I agree that it is a very complicated subject.
What I was trying to say v. the liberals confusing percentage of income with tax burden is similar (although in the other direction) to your criticisms of the Wall Street Journal editorial. Your earlier post and the entire CTJ link as far as I can tell only talks about taxes as a percentage of income. While you are correct (I assume, I have not read the article you refer to, but have seen others like it) that the WSJ concentrates on percentage of the taxes paid to the exclusion of percentage of income. I see these as the same mistake. You can’t simply say that poor people paying 2% more of their income this year while rich people will only pay 1% more is unfair unless you look at how much of the total governtment revenue is paid by each already. Similarly you can’t say that rich people paying 34 times as much at poor people is unfair unless you look at the disparity of their incomes.
Personally, I find problems with measuring citizenship (and thus tax burden) by property ownership. But within certain ranges it does work. For instance as long as we don’t require that poor people pay a share of the governments revenue equal to their population size, and as long as we don’t push the tax burden disparity too far beyond the income disparity everything will work out fine.
The problem comes when you forget either side of the equation. If you assume that the government has a right to everything that eveyone earns (note the implication that paying less taxes is equivilent to recieving a check from the government) then you can be said to have socialistic or communistic tendencies. At least where taxation and property rights are concerned. Meanwhile, when you take the conservative / libertarian ideal too far and suggest that people should only pay voluntary taxes (even that each citizen should pay an equal share of the tax burden) you make the same mistake taken to the opposite extreme. For instance, I don’t want to speak for the WSJ but I have seen libertarian sources suggest that even a flat tax is itself progressive. The numbers you quoted sugest one reason.
And just because I love the data The congressional Budget site indicates that federally income taxes are more than half of all revenues. If you include social security then it is by far and away the biggest source of revenue. What we need to make sense of the CTJ numbers is a similar breakdown state by state.
BTW thanks for the cite on the income numbers. It does include some information about how much of the tax burden goes to various groups.
I’m not sure this is off topic, but it also seems to me that you have confused the disparity of income with some other form of problem.
You seem to be arguing that the difference in gain is itself a problem. This sounds very much like the old refrain fo the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. The problem, of course is that you have not included how many people are in the two groups you selected. If the top 5% of the population increased its wealth by 150% and the middle 60% increased its wealth by 10%, where did the majority of the new wealth go?
But of course I am commiting the same error because I am pulling these numbers out of an unsavory place. 
All I am saying is that disparity of income is not the end of the poverty vs wealthy store. Just like percentage of income is not the end of the pregressive vs. regressive tax story.
That’s interesting. I had a close friend who was very active in Socialist party politics. He was always careful to point out he wasn’t a Communist, though the distinction wasn’t always clear. He was a very interesting fellow to chat politics with.
He reacted similarly if less intensely, chuckling at the distinction between “liberal” and “conservative” in American politics. They were both essentially the same with different window dressings, from his perspective. At the end of the day, in his opinion, the difference between liberal and conservative results didn’t amount to shucks, and he was greatly amused at all the caterwauling back and forth across the political aisle.
So, he had no strong affection for liberals, considering them inneffectual and wishy-washy.
Stratocaster:
And the same can be said of some Libertarians and how they view “conservatives” of the stripe of Bush I or Dole.
John, except libertarianism is not an extreme version of conservatism. True Libertarians are as liberal on social matters as they are conservative on fiscal ones, after all.
OK, first I posted what I thought was the reasons that Liberalism is associated with Communism, and now I have the time to post what I personally believe.
OK DTC, as for your first point, I personally believe that Liberal doesn’t automatically equal atheist or agnostic, so I agree with you on that point.
Now, as for your second point, I’m not talking about mandating religious practices in school.
I’m talking about things like sometimes schools having to be sued because they allow secular after school groups but not religious after school groups.
Or cases like that one where an assignment “Who is the person who admire the most” was given, and when a student handed in that it was Jesus, their assignment was rejected on the basis of “Separation of Church and State”.
Now, having said that, I realize that there times where groups like the ACLU have come to the defense of religious groups, and so forth, so I personally don’t believe that all Liberals are hostile towards religion.
Joel, if you are going to play act having a position, then you can’t get all intrguiged and moody about people responding to that position rather than divining your secret hidden views and addressing them.
Yes, and I must have been uclear as to why I posted that.
Many people (as per the OP) assume that communism is an extreme form of “liberlism” just as many people assume that libertarianism is an extreme form of “conservativism”. I don’t think either one is true, but both are beliefs held by some people.
I’ve heard at least a few people refer to “pure” libertarianism as “right-wing” anarchism, as opposed to the “left-wing” anarchism exemplified by syndicalism.
Not sure if that makes any more sense to me, though.
- Tamerlane
Like I said before, I was giving general arguments, not necessarily my own.
But to answer your question, which seems slightly condescending to me, yes, of course I understand the difference.
I never said that. What I said is that, that is what is believed by those who call Liberals Communists. I don’t, and like I said to DTC, I don’t believe that Liberal automatically equals an atheist or agnostic.
Again, that sounds somewhat condescending. Yes, I am aware of that. But are you aware that in many cases, schools had to be sued in order to allow that? And yes, like I said in my post to DTC, sometimes it is the ACLU that takes the pro religious side, so again, I personally don’t automatically associate Liberal with anti religious.
Communism countries, like the former Soviet Union and China are notorious for their religious persecution.
And I’m having a hard time coming up with a reply to your second point. I never said that Liberals, or Communists for that point, were against vague and general well meaning concepts. Nor did I say that those who equate Liberal with Communist think so too.
I’m talking about cases in which schools, businesses, or other groups or organizations try to secularize things specifically Christmas. For example, during the holiday season, if the a tree with lights and/or decorations is put up, it has nothing to do with Hanukkah, Ramadan or Kwanzaa. It’s a Christmas tradition (yes, origionally taken from a Pagen practice, I know), so to call it a Holiday tree is utterly ridiculous.
Many people live on a fixed Social Security income. My grandmother’s (on my moms side) only source of income is Social Security, and many other seniors live that way too.
Then what do you suspect that they will go for then?
Well, I’m happy that you have no grudge against the rich.
However, it is usually Liberals who spout such rhetoric as all or most rich people get their money either through illegal or unethical means, or by inheritance, instead of by hard work. And yes, there are those who fit that description, people like former Tyco CEO Dennis kozlowski, or the Hilton sisters, but to characterize most or all rich people like this, is unfair.
Or painting the rich as people snooty and always trying to get out of paying their fair share of taxes, and so on. Again, it is usually (but not always) Liberals who vilify the rich.
Ah ha ha ha, that’s funny. Hey, tell me something, if someone stated a thread asking why some people still believe that the earth is flat, and I replied “They believe so because of A, B and C” would you accuse me of secretly being a flat earther?
The question is why do some people associate Liberal with Communist. I don’t do that, but I posted why I believe that some people do. That doesn’t automatically mean that I believe all of the arguments that I posted.
And I’m keeping nothing a secret about what I believe. I am a Conservative Republican, but I am not an extremist, and there times where my beliefs will deviate from the standard Conservative or Republican line.
Wow, that’s a lot to respond to, but I’ll keep this brief.
Like I said in a previous post, it usually but not always Liberals who vilify the rich and cultivate the us VS them mentality. For example, well this is more a Democrat VS Republican debate, but I love how almost all tax cuts purposed or passed by Republicans are characterized as tax cuts for the wealthy by the Democrats.
And as for what I believe constitutes fair tax practices, I want a flat tax. I don’t believe the current system where the wealthiest 10 percent pay 59 percent of all income taxes is fair.
You know, people, another reason liberals aren’t communists is that they focus on other issues besides economic policy. Having said that, I’ll reiterate that opposition to tax cuts for the rich can also be in the name of fiscal discipline, rather than a pitting of the lower class against the rich. There is a wide range of social goods that fiscal policy can support, including smaller tax cuts but also a principled paying down of the national debt, or maybe investment in things like alternative energy. (Does this approach make me a “liberal”? You decide.) It’s also worth pinting out that if you support, for example, school vouchers, you are a socialist. You’re not as big a socialist as someone who supports the current system but a bigger one than someone who would eliminate tax-funded education altogether.
But indeed there are other sets of issues that concern liberalism and how we define it. Race is one of the cornerstone issues, but in recent years it has presented us with a severe paradox as it plays out. My brand of liberalism is considerably at odds with polictical correctness. The belief in “systemic racism” has become like a religion–with a witch-hunt mentality. There is a great deal of strictness over expression that might be construed as “profane” in its own way. Minority activists have learned that playing up victimism is a source of power, and there’s a belief that belonging to a particular entitles you to certain privleges. In short the racial left, even as it is positioned several of these “steps” in the “direction” of communism, has come to resemble a form of conservatism. So does being liberal on race mean you favor color blindness, etc.–which had obvious implications back in the 60’s-- or does it mean always favoring minority groups both economicaly and in the cultural sensitivty department?
But to me, the first world in liberalism is sex. “The personal is political” was a catchphrase of the 60’s counterculture that acknowledged the implications of challenging the traditional conservative prohibition on premarital sex (among a lot of other things). Communist regimes tended to be very prudish and disdainful of “bourgeois” decadance. Here, it is religious hackles that are raised by liberal positions on sexual and reproductive issues. Some go so far as to portray them–especially homosexuality-- as an attack on religion. Combine this with the more “blatant” attack on religion represented by church-state issues, and it’s easy to associate liberalism with communism’s official atheism. This is unfair, for although any modernist reform movement will de-emphasize religion, liberals embrace religious tolerance and diversity, and allow for unfettered religious expression so long as it’s confined to the private sector. In so doing they face off against the dominance of one particular religion, Christianity. Communism regards religion in general as standing in the way of its agenda to totally remake society, something to be eliminated or at best, grudgingly accomodated out of political expediency.
deadeyesdad:
This response was all too predictable, but while the epithet “fascist” was grossly overused during the Vietnam era, I seldom heard it during the 80’s and 90’s while liberals were still being called communists and socialists. And while communists either take over the government and completely re-order society or fail to do so, fascism can be said to exist at a low level. It can just be a nasty attitude on the part of right-wingers–“patriotic correctness” if you will. Calling someone a “traitor” for disagreeing with the Bush Administration qualifies. Accusations of fascism can be prertty much summed up as a backlash to the backlash to the Dixie Chicks’ backlash to the backlash to 9/11.