Perpetually Progressive Confiscatory Taxation in America

By William Sullivan

 

Here's a troubling fact.  According to data from The Open Syllabus Project, the most frequently assigned book "relating to economics and money" in college curricula over the last decade is Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto.

The book is often taught as "social theory," so the story goes.  But that's an incorrect description of the content.  It's social theory that requires a specific economic prescription to finance the social vision, which Marx simply describes as a "heavy progressive or graduated income tax."
America adopted this communist prescription long ago.  But don't take my word for it.  Speaking of America's highly progressive income tax, Ronald Reagan said in 1961:

We were once told the income tax would never be more than 2%, and only on the rich.  In our lifetime, this law has grown from 31 to more than 440,000 words.  We have received this progressive tax direct from Karl Marx, who designed it as the prime essential of a socialist state. ...
We have a tax system that, in direct contravention of the Constitution, is not designed solely to raise revenue but is used, openly and admittedly, to control and direct the economy and to equalize the earnings of our people.

He is right about it being "in direct contravention of the Constitution" as intended and adopted by the Founders.  Even Alexander Hamilton, who had liberal views regarding taxation among the Founders, argued in Federalist 35, after discussing a need for "indefinite" powers of taxation when it comes to consumption taxes:

Nothing remains but the landed interest; and this, in a political view, and particularly in relation to taxes, I take to be perfectly united, from the wealthiest landlord down to the poorest tenant.  No tax can be laid on land which will not affect the proprietor of millions of acres as well as the proprietors of a single acre.  Every landholder will therefore have a common interest to keep the taxes on land as low as possible; and common interest may always be reckoned upon as the surest bond of sympathy.

If one considers wealth property (which it surely is), the principle here should be entirely clear.  Confiscatory taxes could ensure the practical service of the "common interest" only if they were uniform in nature, thus allowing citizens to have equal interest in compelling representatives to keep confiscatory taxes, as a whole, low. 

Our deviation from that simple principle has cobbled the path we walk today.

With income earnings broken down into quintiles today, the bottom two quintiles (up to $48,000 annual income) not only pay no taxes, but collect additional income from the coffers filled by the other three.

But we just had a tax cut passed, remember?  In the wake of that tax cut, we find that those bottom two quintiles collect more from the coffers.  The next two quintiles do not collect more, though they pay less.  The top quintile of earners (over $150K annually) will provide a full 87% of the revenue to the federal coffers, up from 84% this demographic represents in revenue this year. 

In what sense has the principle of uniform property rights and representative liberty, as described by Hamilton, been upheld?  We now have Republican Congress and a Republican president, yet in spite of that, the share of profit versus liability in exchange for votes among the economic classes, as it relates to tax policy, has become more steeply progressive.  This ensures that the "common interest" can become only less likely to be "reckoned upon as the surest bond of sympathy."  For if 80% of Americans are either paying less or collecting more, what reason might they have to protect the property rights of the other 20%?

This is all by design, make no mistake.  We have become an ever more redistributive nation, with a government creeping toward Marx's vision.

We like to pretend we have a "mixed economy" – that we can embrace those good things about progressive taxation and socialism, as Marx described, to find that ever elusive "third way" between the economic principles of economic liberty and government interventionism without forthrightly abridging the foundation our Founders prescribed.

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Perpetually Progressive Confiscatory Taxation in America