Close Nav Search Close Search search. The Narrative "I believe that we should be asking the very wealthiest people in this country to start paying their fair share of taxes. Who Will Pay? Blood from a Stone Even those who support higher taxes on the rich should acknowledge that high-income households do not earn anywhere near enough to fund even a fraction of the welfare-state expansions on offer this campaign season.
Medicare and Social Security shortfalls are defined as the annual program benefits that must be funded from general revenues because payroll taxes, Medicare premiums, and other dedicated revenues are insufficient. They include the interest cost of expanding the national debt. Both figures include the resulting interest costs of higher federal debt. This reflects the current-policy baseline, which assumes extensions of expiring tax cuts and discretionary spending increases.
His latest version of the bill includes a much more comprehensive long-term-care benefit than previous versions, which will raise the cost. Several candidates have proposed taxing capital gains as ordinary income.
There is reason to believe that this is a large overestimate. In response, economists Lawrence H. Applying that Biden is right: After decades of widening income and wealth disparities, it is time to increase public investment and ask the wealthiest to contribute more to the common good. View the discussion thread. Skip to main content. A must-read political newsletter that breaks news and catches you up on what is happening. Most Popular - Easy to read, daily digest of the news from The Hill and around the world.
The Hill's must read political newsletter that breaks news and catches you up on what happened in the morning and what to look for after lunch. In practice, however, it can be hard to sustain this attack on egalitarianism.
What do we take from all this philosophizing? A better, more rigorous definition of envy, I think. If we want to take envy seriously as a charge against progressive taxation, then we need a reasonable definition of what envy might actually entail. Distress and destruction: These are the crucial elements of envy. Using this more rigorous definition, envy appears to be a rather poor explanation for most progressive tax reforms. To be sure, such taxes are often driven by a sense of distress at rising inequality — at the wealth of others, in other words.
And they are often designed to limit or even destroy the wealth that makes that inequality possible. It fails especially when that funding is targeted toward alleviating poverty. When a political coalition that extends well into the middle and even upper classes champions a tax program that takes from the rich and gives to the poor, can that really be described as envy?
Can you truly be envious on behalf of someone else? Especially when your own wealth might be a target of those taxes? The issue here is motivation. Any reasonably precise definition of envy must treat it as a negative, visceral emotion, not one rooted in moral considerations.
When a tax is designed to advance a set of moral imperatives, then it really cannot be described as an envy tax: The point of the levy is to solve a problem, not simply to inflict pain. Lindsey might grant this point but still insist that a tax designed with a rate that exceeds the revenue-maximizing rate must still be rooted in envy: If raising money to help the poor were the real motive, then raising the maximum amount of money would be desirable.
Sacrificing revenue for the sake of a non-maximizing rate can be explained only by spite. However, there are other reasons why lawmakers and the voting coalitions that elect them might care about factors other than revenue maximization. True democracy, in their view, required limits on economic as well as political power, because the former often led directly to the latter. In evaluating the envy charge, they simply have to believe that they are right.
The crucial element of envy, in other words, lies in the realm of motive. If envy is going to mean anything useful, it has to mean something indefensible. It may still be a bad tax — unwise, unaffordable, even deeply unfair.
The philosophers may be excessively picky about how they define their terms, but they are right to insist on this element in the definition of envy. Without it, envy is reduced to something much less damning. Indeed, any tax scaled to ability to pay would fail the envy test, including not just income and estate levies but excise taxes on luxury goods and various property taxes.
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