February 23, 2012
Deadbeat Dads
There are few things as universally despised as
a deadbeat dad. Creating dependents and then refusing to provide financial
support is cruel and irresponsible.
We expect even the poorest of fathers to pay support for their dependent children, and yet we find no fault with the 49.5% of American households who do not pay any income tax, the major source of financial support for the millions of Americans who have been made dependent on government programs.
If you recall, it was just 18% free riders that were intolerable when it came to government health care – so much so that we had to jettison the Constitution to save the Republic from them with the individual mandate. Why then do we let 49.5% of Americans channel their inner Timothy Geithner and pay nothing towards all other government programs combined? Are they necessary or only 50.5% necessary?
There are 118 million households in this country, and the median household income is roughly $50,000 per year, so the amount of tax revenue raised by a minimum tax – let’s say a paltry Romney-esque 15% - would be around $450 billion. Or to use the 10-year pixie-dust triple-speak of Washington budget geeks, $6 trillion.
I can hear it now; the argument against taxing those who pay nothing is that they can’t afford it. Has there been a single deadbeat dad in the history of deadbeatery who has not made that very same argument to the court when it was time to set his child support? And has a single one of them ever won it? Never. Everybody has to pay something.
Imagine if you will that every other car at the drive-thru gets to pass its bill on to the car behind. How do you think the freeloading happy meal driver in car #1 will respond to the question, “do you want fries with that?” Sure! Supersize it! And pay off my student loans and mortgage and throw in a hot apple pie and a liposuction. And make that next guy throw another buck into that charity bucket right there – the heartless bastard – there are kids who don’t have enough to eat, you know.
Is it so difficult to understand why the folks in car #2 – i.e. the 50.5% of us who actually pay income tax - bristle at the notion that we are not paying our “fair share”? Before a single penny is added to the bill of those who pay tax already, the truly fair thing to do would be to let all the non-payers catch up. There is nothing stopping them from implementing tax fairness on their own; the IRS accepts overage payments.
And do you remember that argument from Senate hopeful Elizabeth Warren that the rich should happily pay more tax because they benefited from roads and schools and police and such? Well, don’t the deadbeat 49.5% benefit from those same services? Why not increase taxes on them, too? To something greater than zero, for example.
Or for that matter, doesn’t every charity and tax-exempt advocacy group drive those roads, attend those schools, and call those 911 centers, too? Why is it that we only guilt-trip on the job creators and people who pay taxes already? Why is it “fairness” for a smaller and smaller number of taxpayers pay more and more of the taxes?
The politics of taxation is fundamentally dishonest. You convince a very large voting block that a very small voting block is freeloading and you make punishing those few deadbeats a moral crusade. Everybody likes a moral crusade; it makes us feel all moral and stuff. The favorite bad guys are the rich, because resentment is easily marketed – it is the path of least intellectual resistance.
What the class warriors conveniently leave out of their tax-the-rich pitch is that it never works, a lesson we learned AGAIN this week from our friends in the U.K. Last year they increased the top marginal tax rate to 50% - what people in some states here would pay under President Obama’s proposed tax fairness plan – but instead of increasing, revenues dropped. Duh.
Surprise, surprise - the rich are moving out, or shielding income, or simply sitting on their money instead of putting it in play where it will be taxed. When big money sits on the sidelines jobs are not created, and jobs – not government programs – are the answer to poverty. When you tax the rich you punish the poor.
It is ironic that liberals who rail against poverty are also the first to demonize the wealthy job creators who eliminate it. They should spend a little less time regurgitating 100 year old disproved slogans and a little more time acquainting themselves with current income statistics – the Current Population Survey (CPS) for 2010 from the Census Bureau is a pretty good place to start.
Each of the five income quintiles in the U.S. now contains 23.7 million households. In the poorest fifth, 14.8 million households have zero income earners living in them; in the richest fifth only 722 thousand households have no earners. Only 1 million of the poorest households have two or more earners, while 17.7 million of the richest households have two or more. Jobs cure poverty – it is that simple.
And so do traditional values. Only 4 million of the poorest quintile households are married couple families, while 18.6 million of the richest quintile are married couple families. This should surprise no one; traditional values only get to be that way if they prove to be beneficial over centuries. I’m not proposing that government should legislate values, but it can quit being openly hostile to the ones that work – family, faith, freedom, thrift, charity, marriage, work, responsibility, patriotism.
As much as he would like you to think so, President Obama cannot make you richer, and for that matter neither can Governor Scott Walker. The latest income statistics reinforce the familiar instruction about what to do to avoid poverty and move up from the bottom fifth into the higher income quintiles; and those are things we must do for ourselves:
Get a job and keep working, get married and stay that way, have children, don’t do drugs, don’t commit crimes, save for retirement, don’t spend more than you earn, pay your taxes, and vote Libertarian.
Ok, I just made up that last one. Fair is not when half of us pay a lot for what all of us benefit from; fair is when all of us pay a little so that a limited government can do the few things we cannot do for ourselves.
We expect even the poorest of fathers to pay support for their dependent children, and yet we find no fault with the 49.5% of American households who do not pay any income tax, the major source of financial support for the millions of Americans who have been made dependent on government programs.
If you recall, it was just 18% free riders that were intolerable when it came to government health care – so much so that we had to jettison the Constitution to save the Republic from them with the individual mandate. Why then do we let 49.5% of Americans channel their inner Timothy Geithner and pay nothing towards all other government programs combined? Are they necessary or only 50.5% necessary?
There are 118 million households in this country, and the median household income is roughly $50,000 per year, so the amount of tax revenue raised by a minimum tax – let’s say a paltry Romney-esque 15% - would be around $450 billion. Or to use the 10-year pixie-dust triple-speak of Washington budget geeks, $6 trillion.
I can hear it now; the argument against taxing those who pay nothing is that they can’t afford it. Has there been a single deadbeat dad in the history of deadbeatery who has not made that very same argument to the court when it was time to set his child support? And has a single one of them ever won it? Never. Everybody has to pay something.
Imagine if you will that every other car at the drive-thru gets to pass its bill on to the car behind. How do you think the freeloading happy meal driver in car #1 will respond to the question, “do you want fries with that?” Sure! Supersize it! And pay off my student loans and mortgage and throw in a hot apple pie and a liposuction. And make that next guy throw another buck into that charity bucket right there – the heartless bastard – there are kids who don’t have enough to eat, you know.
Is it so difficult to understand why the folks in car #2 – i.e. the 50.5% of us who actually pay income tax - bristle at the notion that we are not paying our “fair share”? Before a single penny is added to the bill of those who pay tax already, the truly fair thing to do would be to let all the non-payers catch up. There is nothing stopping them from implementing tax fairness on their own; the IRS accepts overage payments.
And do you remember that argument from Senate hopeful Elizabeth Warren that the rich should happily pay more tax because they benefited from roads and schools and police and such? Well, don’t the deadbeat 49.5% benefit from those same services? Why not increase taxes on them, too? To something greater than zero, for example.
Or for that matter, doesn’t every charity and tax-exempt advocacy group drive those roads, attend those schools, and call those 911 centers, too? Why is it that we only guilt-trip on the job creators and people who pay taxes already? Why is it “fairness” for a smaller and smaller number of taxpayers pay more and more of the taxes?
The politics of taxation is fundamentally dishonest. You convince a very large voting block that a very small voting block is freeloading and you make punishing those few deadbeats a moral crusade. Everybody likes a moral crusade; it makes us feel all moral and stuff. The favorite bad guys are the rich, because resentment is easily marketed – it is the path of least intellectual resistance.
What the class warriors conveniently leave out of their tax-the-rich pitch is that it never works, a lesson we learned AGAIN this week from our friends in the U.K. Last year they increased the top marginal tax rate to 50% - what people in some states here would pay under President Obama’s proposed tax fairness plan – but instead of increasing, revenues dropped. Duh.
Surprise, surprise - the rich are moving out, or shielding income, or simply sitting on their money instead of putting it in play where it will be taxed. When big money sits on the sidelines jobs are not created, and jobs – not government programs – are the answer to poverty. When you tax the rich you punish the poor.
It is ironic that liberals who rail against poverty are also the first to demonize the wealthy job creators who eliminate it. They should spend a little less time regurgitating 100 year old disproved slogans and a little more time acquainting themselves with current income statistics – the Current Population Survey (CPS) for 2010 from the Census Bureau is a pretty good place to start.
Each of the five income quintiles in the U.S. now contains 23.7 million households. In the poorest fifth, 14.8 million households have zero income earners living in them; in the richest fifth only 722 thousand households have no earners. Only 1 million of the poorest households have two or more earners, while 17.7 million of the richest households have two or more. Jobs cure poverty – it is that simple.
And so do traditional values. Only 4 million of the poorest quintile households are married couple families, while 18.6 million of the richest quintile are married couple families. This should surprise no one; traditional values only get to be that way if they prove to be beneficial over centuries. I’m not proposing that government should legislate values, but it can quit being openly hostile to the ones that work – family, faith, freedom, thrift, charity, marriage, work, responsibility, patriotism.
As much as he would like you to think so, President Obama cannot make you richer, and for that matter neither can Governor Scott Walker. The latest income statistics reinforce the familiar instruction about what to do to avoid poverty and move up from the bottom fifth into the higher income quintiles; and those are things we must do for ourselves:
Get a job and keep working, get married and stay that way, have children, don’t do drugs, don’t commit crimes, save for retirement, don’t spend more than you earn, pay your taxes, and vote Libertarian.
Ok, I just made up that last one. Fair is not when half of us pay a lot for what all of us benefit from; fair is when all of us pay a little so that a limited government can do the few things we cannot do for ourselves.
“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D. Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment.
