An Open Letter to the Congressional Supercommittee
about Taxing the Rich
The rich have arranged that they have a disproportionate share of the wealth. They control salaries. They control how many jobs there are. They control how much dividend is siphoned out of viable companies into personal pockets. And let’s be frank: They control a great deal of Congress. They have way more control than We The ‘Little’ People have.
The rich probably have no sense of where every dollar they have really goes. They probably can’t afford to be bothered with such trivialities, and almost certainly hire someone else do such accounting. Asking people of such means to pay a little more is not equivalent to asking a working family to pay a little more. A working family claws for every dollar and has to know where the dollars go.
It’s not about redistributing wealth, it’s about redistributing burden.
For poor people, paying extra tax is bearing more burden; for rich people it is not, it is just less luxury. Or less opulent luxury. The higher the wealth the more one has to struggle to find adjectives that make it clear how minuscule the degree of personal sacrifice is.
To the super-wealthy, these are just numbers. To the poor and middle class, this is the difference between having food on the table or not, having medical care or not, sending your child to school or not. When you’re asked to pay more, it matters a great deal whether you already have enough and are paying out of a surplus, or whether you’re drawing out of funds you need for essentials.
There is simply no comparison in terms of the personal burden shared. The poor and middle class are the only ones with a tax burden. The rich simply have a tax. But no burden.
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RomanticPoetess
Sandra Stephens
old new lefty
marytkelly
oaxacangringa
CoyoteOldStyle
Salon.com
Comments
Your last paragraph cuts right to the heart of it, Kent.
It is so easy not to be generous when you live in that gated community and the only average folk you see are the guys mowing the lawn and the house keeper.
But you have it here - what will they sacrifice materially to save the planet? i would argue - not a material thing - true wealth would never let itself get beat up that bad - and when it does happen - the shame alone has been just to much for them to bare.
RR
And some people make far more than a million dollars a year. Even a failed CEO can walk away with tens of millions of dollars. And so I have to wonder -- can't these folks afford to pay a few percent more in taxes? But to hear them talk about it, paying a little more in tax would result in the end of civilization as we know it. I don't get it.
I have a high paying job. I own two homes (one is rental property). I have an advanced professional degree and certification. I obtained these things by hard work and sacrifice. I save alot of money every year so that I can take care of myself. My parents will leave me nothing at their deaths, they worked blue collar jobs so their 7 children could have orthodontia, a big enough house to grow up in, and simple but plentiful food to eat. College tuition was up to us.
What's my point! I give heavily to charity (not a church) but to the local women's center, to doctor's without borders, to the children's relief fund, to Smile Train (look it up), and to big brothers big sisters. I vote for every library tax and support every kind of publicly supported safety net program.
Why don't I think others should be able to make it on their own like me? Because I was born with good looks, a strong body, a healthy intelligence and inner motivation. We are not all equal. We all have some gifts, but many of us have so much more than others. I know many, many people who are better looking, smarter and more motiviated than me.
As citizens we have a duty to each other to ensure a basic dignity and way of life regardless of your luck, inheritance, gifts or lack of any. It's not wealth or education or success that differentiates liberals from conservatives. It's the liberal assumption that we owe something to each other that sets a liberal apart from a conservative these days.
I used to work in a business that had customers who numbered among the very richest in the country, and the products we sold included the most expensive things in their category, primarily recreational items, some with more utilitarian functions. I got to spend time in their homes, as these items were installed as part of the environment. It always amazed me how they could agonize over purchases, which for them represented as much of their income as the average blue collar worker spends on an upscale dinner. People with billions could nuance rationals and cheap-out in the most absurd ways, then would complain because things didn't function well.
On the other hand, there were those who'd spend a million dollars as almost an afterthought, (not to say they weren't demanding about the results if it didn't meet expectations). I went into homes that were thirteen to twenty five thousand square feet for families of five people. They had artwork in their entrance ways that was worth more than most people in America will ever see in a retirement account. They couldn't possible utilize the space, aside for occasional social gatherings, and as studies have shown, no matter how large a house is, almost all the time the occupants spend in it is in less than 2000 square feet. But they thought they had to have it.
I'll never forget the conversation I had with one family's Nannie, after she'd called me to deal with an alarm going off in the equipment we'd installed. She said, "You know, everything in this place is so special that there are people like you coming here constantly to deal with anything that arises, no normal person can understand it. The lights in the entrance way are so high up, that when they have to be changed, the electrician has to come here with a man lift and roll it inside. I can't imagine why anyone would want to live this way."
Why indeed? As F. Scott Fitzgerald said in The Great Gatsby, "The rich, are different from you or I."
He also said: "I couldn't forgive him or like him but I saw what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Disy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made..."
Different? Yes. Necessary, for perhaps being the driving force behind many large endeavors? Perhaps. Allowed to make the rest of us victims of their avarice and self indulgence? Never, but if "the rest of us" stand by silent, they surely will.
No matter where on Earth you live, you have a responsibility to contribute something for the physical space you occupy and the benefits you enjoy. If you have a two bedroom apartment, the rent's going to be greater than for a one bedroom. And if you live in a ***ing palace--enjoy it. But realize you still have to pay for it.
Big thumbs up for this, Kent.
Just because I don't know how much money I have doesn't mean I should have less of it. I visit my money once a quarter, where it resides in the Caymans, and if there's any less of that money than there should be in the future, because of some poorly-dressed confiscatory mob, I'll be furious
You people need to be stopped. I'm going to have my secretary's assistant tell my congressman in no uncertain terms that I want something *done* about you.
Anyway, Kent, agreed about the difference between tax burden and tax. Cuts right to the heart of the matter.
I'm quite sure the charity would rather have Gates' $25 million than my $13.21. The point is that both they and I sacrificed equally. That reality doesn't seem to penetrate the walls of ivory towers.
Snowden, honestly, the level of riches is so high that it would never be one less bottle of wine. Nor probably 50. Given that there's that group of 400 people whose combined wealth is greater than the combined wealth of the lower 50% of all Americans, we're talking pretty big discrepancies.
Marte, I went back and added the extra quote-marks you asked for. Thanks for the suggestion.
Mishima, of course, some of them will tell you it's in assets. Like those companies that ‘earn’ them the title of “job creator.” If it were the case that this extra tax would mean a true loss of jobs, that would surprise me, but it could be handled by incentives specifically addressed to the jobs issue, not to personal taxes.
Samasiam, at least they were spending some of their wealth on hiring people in for services or perhaps sometimes paying local artists and designers. I dunno. Hard to know what to make of it. Maybe it's that we as society don't give them something to do with it. In a way, the taxation thing might give some of them a better sense of self-worth, like they knew they were connected to something. If some Ayn Rand fanatic didn't come along and tell them they were bad for indulging it.
Shiral, more than that you have to pay for it, I wish these people would realize they have to earn it. A lot of this is just not earned. It just comes for free because you already have money. Here I recommend my article Bonus Pay for Bonus Pay to give more depth on what I mean.
Man Talk Now, ... uh, ... thanks for the warning. :)
Redux, thanks for the kind words and the helpful note about logistics in the Caymans.
MTN, I'll be watching for your blog after you move to Texas. You seem a fine observer and I'm sure you'll have lots to say.
Lea, thanks for visiting and the support.
FLW, yep, I hope that does something. One never knows.
Tom, I don't like that use of the word sacrifice. I know what you meant, certainly, but at the risk of being a pedant: sacrifice, to me, is the giving up of something dear. I think if you have so much money you can't individually count the dollars and you give up a chunk of something you can't count, you have sacrificed nothing. So in the example you cite, after the transaction, you've got less of things that are dear to you and the rich person has the same number of things that are dear and less of things that don't matter. You have sacrificed a lot and him nothing. It's not proportional. That was my point of the red areas to the left of the vertical dotted “enough” line in my recent blog post Enough.
Oryoki, I know some rich who don't bother with health insurance and some who do. I think the point is, as I was remarking to Tom before, it's not really an issue of something dear to them. It's an incidental either way. They're not going to fail to have enough. (Although they can screw up, as apparently Jobs did, and decide they don't need treatment when they do. That's a different problem. Even rich can't buy your way out of making some bad decisions, I guess.)
OLT, yep, even a lot of republicans and tea partiers, just not the leadership, think that such taxes are reasonable. It's silly we should have to lobby the leadership to do what they should be hearing from their constituents. I guess they're trying to “lead” but you'd think they could find better ways.
Myriad, I keep hoping those things put at least some money back into the economy. Probably not imported bags. But ... maybe a “show off opulence globally, buy local opulence” campaign would work.
--sinclair louis
"One withstands the invasion of armies; one does not withstand the invasion of ideas."
--victor hugo
occupy party reaches critical mass/seismic effect--now what?
that blows
one of them said he was planning to go
to the Occupy group
and set them straight
I wonder how that worked for him.
rated with love
Poetess, it would indeed be interesting to see someone try to “set anyone in the 99% straight” on matters like this. I don't think this is subject to the usual spin machine sway. Very large numbers of the population feel there is some sense of basic fairness lacking in the Republican job-creator-wannabe-called hard line position on no new taxes even on the rich. (Of curiosity, did you run into any who were subscribing to the even harder line advocated recently where people are encouraged to take a pledge to not hire until ‘dictator’ Obama is removed?)