The rich must pay. Photo: Tish Wells/Tribune News Service via Getty Images With spring blooming, COVID cases falling, and the economy rebounding, many Americans are feeling optimistic about the future. Yet the “Biden boom” is not benefiting all equally. And as life returns to normal for the middle class, it’s important not to lose sight of those whose lives are still shadowed by economic trepidation — such as superrich capitalists who do not want to pay higher taxes on their unearned income.
As Myers and Draper’s remarks indicate, superrich critics of Biden’s plan are torn between two impulses: to condemn the policy on moral grounds and to criticize it on utilitarian ones . The first option has the virtue of being unfalsifiable; no one can prove that God isn’t a college libertarian who idles away eternity by the pearly gates, smoking blunts and lecturing progressives about the “nonaggression principle” before condemning them to hell. Yet the moral argument is also politically inert.
• First, “under current tax rules, all gains from investments are fully taxed, but all losses are not fully deductible.” The “fairness” argument is, ultimately, little more than an expression of unexamined class entitlement. The wealthy investor is presumed to have earned, on some metaphysical level, every dollar of pretax income he’s managed to accrue. For the government to tax that income twice — first, before he’s managed to collect his rightful share of corporate profits, and again, after he’s chosen to profitably reinvest that income instead of spending it on consumption — is unjust on its face.
Notably, this report was considering the impact of changes to the capital-gains rate for Americans with incomes in the mid-six figures and above. Biden sets his top capital-gains tax bracket at the historically high level of $1 million. The notion that higher capital gains taxes will radically reduce the savings rate among the richest 0.
Yet the evidence for the macroeconomic benefits of these policies is at least as robust as the benefits of low capital-gains taxes. For example:
EricLevitz 'In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme.' -- Aristotle
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EricLevitz We got the message, taxes are for the small ppl...
EricLevitz Right: