Conservative buzzword watch: "Tax Sanctimony"

[JHB]

Bloomberg News columnist and former Wall Street Journal editorial board member http://www.amityshlaes.com/bio.php">Amity Shlaes has http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-18/get-rich-pay-lower-taxes-boost-u-s-revenue-commentary-by-amity-shlaes.html">another column shilling for lower taxes for the rich (it'll boost revenue!) making the rounds of op-ed pages across the country.

She uses a term, "tax sanctimony", to belittle calls for increasing taxes, especially at the top margins. She's used the term before, but it seems ripe to be picked up by others looking for justification of why "shared sacrifice" shouldn't include certain sacrifices for certain (wealthy) people.

"Tax sanctimony" is used to paint those calling for higher taxes on the wealthy as moralizing scolds who need to make themselves feel good by taking a righteous stance...even if it's not all that effective and likely damaging.

Spring also brings a collective impulse to reform. That usually gets expressed in a resolve to make the tax code more progressive. Some of the demand for more progressivity is revenue-related. The government needs the money, or thinks it does.

But some of progressive reform is just the annual expression of that spring impulse to make life clean, fair and right. To “maintain or increase the progressivity of the tax code” is, for example, one of the recommendations being quoted right now from the report by President Barack Obama’s bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.

Ritual isn’t always logical, however. It can be destructive, precisely because it repeats. Too much sin-and- repentance, and even we don’t believe ourselves any more. Too many detoxes, and you’re poisoning yourself.
***
Why then did Obama ignore the record of lower rates bringing more revenue? Because there’s a lot wrong in the world, starting with the federal debt, and continuing on to joblessness, war in Libya, and Japan’s nuclear crisis. So the general urge to purge is greater, and it’s being channeled into tax sanctimony. But that doesn’t mean this particular ritual is worth honoring.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-18/get-rich-pay-lower-taxes-boost-u-s-revenue-commentary-by-amity-shlaes.html

And this is where we all start humming a tune from Fiddler on the Roof and sing about "Projectionnnnn, Projection, Projection! There's a lot of sanctimony from the well-off about "class warfare" and "redistribution of wealth", as if that war hasn't been blazing away for a generation, or that redistribution doesn't count if the wealth redistributes upward.

Leaving aside the usual lies of omission by ignoring payroll taxes when discussing the share of the tax burden ("The very rich shoulder far more of the collective burden than their share in the population warrants"), the column misses (or evades) the real value to the economy of highly progressive taxes:

It puts a damper on how fast the already-wealthy can get more wealthy. And in what ways they can do it. They will seek out ways to not get taxed as highly even if it kills them, or gets them to pay people more, which to hear them complain amounts to the same thing.

Low taxes on high incomes tends to reward speculation and liquidation, big payoffs when you cash out or hit big. Higher rates shift more reward to a steadier building of value in real assets. That requires real investment, not just playing market games. And that sort of investment includes investing in people. Paying them, training them, investing in them so that they will help build your value.

It's worked before. Certainly not perfectly, and social prejudices pointedly excluded parts of our population, but it did work. A lot better, overall, than what we have now.

So if you hear a wingnut (or a "serious" person) start nagging about "tax sanctimony", toss it right back at them, with interest.

[liberal N proud]

1. Under the current system far more of the population is being excluded

[HughBeaumont]

2. LOWER RATES DON'T BRING IN MORE REVENUE!!!!!!

GOD DAMN IT, WHY do they keep repeating this nonsensical and idiotic point? WHY?? It's Republican fantasy fairy tale bullshit and they get away with it, never asked to prove exactly how and when that's ever worked.

[JHB]

3. Because if you create a fogbank from huge-enough steaming piles of dung...

...you can point to it and say "Y'know, where there's smoke..."

[zbdent]

4. "(it'll boost revenue!)"

right ... that worked so well 2001-2009 ...

[JHB]

5. Hey, Rocky! Watch me pull a Rabbit out of my hat!

Awww, that trick never works.