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I find the liberal argument about tax cuts for the "rich" a little bit founded too. It's patently unfair that we have differing tax rates for capital gains and income, especially since the rich have much more of their disposal income in capital than wages, which they use to great extent in the form of stock options and bizarre partnerships that structure their incomes in such a manner.
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Do you find any tax structure that isn't effectively flat "patently unfair"? How about the
growing income gap?
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If we could prove that our economic system was mostly
pareto efficient, would that change your views on redistribution?
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I'm not an economist, so your wikipedia link is appreciated. Kind of hard to see how we could be pareto efficient when any multimillionaire could give $10,000 to a poor person and not notice the difference. In fact, I think pareto efficency speaks to exactly the problem I have with Bush's tax cut.
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Seriously, anyone who thinks the poor are worse off than years ago should just ponder the deflationary effects of rapidly improving computer technology and ordinary utilities (which existing wealth made possible), like the following fact:
"In 1970, according to the American Housing Survey (from HUD and the Department of Commerce ,then called the Annual Housing Survey, Table A-1, p. 32), 36% of the 67 million households in America had air conditioning, 11% had central air. This is the earliest data available from this survey.
In 2005, the most recent data from the same survey, (Table 2-4, p. 66) 82% of the 15 million households with income below the poverty line had air conditioning, 52% had central air."
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Wow, man. Memo from the rich: be thankful that you (might) have air conditioning. The rising tide lifts all boats. Now gimme my tax cut.
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To liberal minded thinkers - is it so implausible that the richest members of society are far more productive than ordinary people?
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What, intrinsically? Don't you think
George Bush kind of hurts this argument? Do you think that if we reincarnated all rich people into poor circumstances in another life they would grow up to be as 'productive' as a group as in their previous lives?
From the income gap link I posted:
"Others have portrayed inequality as a necessary condition for socioeconomic mobility, arguing that people who are willing to work hard and play by the rules face a better chance of making it to the top here than in any other country. But here, too, the evidence suggests otherwise. Even as economic inequality has been rising, social mobility has been declining. According to sociologist David Wright, the probability that a child born to parents in the third quartile of the income distribution would move up into the top quartile was only half as large in 1998 as in 1973. Economist Thomas Hertz has found that children whose parents are in the bottom fifth of the income distribution have only a 7.3 percent chance of making it into the top fifth. In contrast, children born in the top fifth have a 42.3 percent chance of remaining there. Contrary to popular impressions, socioeconomic mobility is now lower in the United Stated than in most other industrialized countries."
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Pragmatically, I support progressive taxation - I guess that's what it takes to keep the plebes satisfied.
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Something for the plebes' listening and viewing pleasure [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]