Pay Your Fair Share?
by Ben Shapiro
President Joe Biden this week attempted to inject life into his
ailing presidency by dragging out of the closet the hoariest of
political cliches: “fairness” in taxation.
Touting his new $3.5 trillion tax-and-spending bill, which would
radically increase corporate taxes, personal income taxes, and so-
called sin taxes, Biden stated, “It’s not enough just to build back.
We have to build back better than before … . I’m not out to punish
anyone. I’m a capitalist. If you can make a million or a billion
dollars, that’s great. God bless you. All I’m asking is you pay your
fair share. Pay your fair share, just like middle-class folks do.”
Of course, those who earn high incomes don’t pay like middle-
class folks do. They pay far, far more. IRS statistics show that the
top 1% of income earners pay more in federal income tax than the
bottom 90% combined. While the top 1% earned 21% of all income in
2018, they paid 40% of all income-tax revenue. The top 10% paid more
than 70% of all federal income tax.
In fact, according to the American Enterprise Institute, those
in the highest quintile of income earners pay, on average, well over
$50,000 per year in net taxes—that is, taxes minus government bene-
fits received—while those in the bottom 60% of income earners receive
net tax benefits.
According to The Washington Post, the top 10% of American income
earners pay nearly half of all income taxes, compared with just 27%
for the top 10% of Swedes, 31% for the top 10% of Germans, and 28%
for France’s top 10%.
So what, precisely, does Biden mean by “pay their fair share”?
Perhaps he means simple sloganeering. Like Rep. Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., donning a Cinderella ball gown emblazoned with
the words “Tax the Rich” to the Met Gala—a dress made by Aurora
James, a woman who owes tens of thousands of dollars in back taxes
and who has received more than $40,000 in federal pandemic aid—class
-warfare sloganeering is more about the sloganeering than the class
warfare.
No Democrat seems prepared to define what “fairness” constitutes,
other than “a word I use to pander to the rubes, while hobnobbing
with the rich.”
And Biden’s “fairness” pitch has to do with good economic policy,
of course. In 2008, then-Sen. Barack Obama was asked during a debate
about raising the capital gains tax, even if it lowered net govern-
ment revenue. He answered, “I would look at raising the capital gains
tax for purposes of fairness.” In other words, Obama explicitly
stated that he would damage the economy on behalf of a vague, kinder-
garten notion of equal outcome.
In the end, the “tax the rich to be fair” notion rests on a simple
lie; namely, the lie that income distribution is purely a matter of
privilege or luck. It isn’t. In the main, in a free market system,
income distribution is the result of successful decision-making that
must be incentivized, rather than punished, if we wish to see a more
prosperous society.
Some people game the system, and some are indeed beneficiaries of
insider deal-making. But most success in capitalism is due to inno-
vation, entrepreneurialism, and creativity. Biden’s “fairness” cuts
directly against these core elements of progress on behalf of politi-
cal pandering.
If we truly care about fairness—a more nuanced and complete defi-
nition of fairness that encompasses rewards for productive decisions
and disincentives for counterproductive decision-making—we must
abandon the politically convenient notion that those who earn more
have somehow stolen from the system and must be punished for their
crimes.
Lack of distributive equality does not equal unfairness, and
anyone who argues differently abandons the real world—and the possi-
bility of a better life for everyone—in favor of the flattering lie
that all roads ought to end in the same basic material outcome.
This subject has been just another lie that Democrats continue
to push through the corrupt media.
Truth is a precious commodity shared by few in today's America.
We must continue believing that God's commands and our laws will
rule over our land.
Conservatively,
John
Conservativelyjohn.com 