This will be a short diary but it's taken me a long time to get to this point. I remember asking my dad when I was in third grade why the Government didn't levy one rate for all personal income, that would allow people to skip the maze of paperwork required to file yearly taxes. He carefully walked me through how such policy was regressive and would actually pose a greater burden on the poor. That made sense to me at the time and has stuck with me.
Let's face it, though, it's not remotely accurate. American tax policy doesn't favor the poor, or the middle class or even the upper class for that matter. It favors the super rich who make a sizable portion of their income via passive investments. It favors the children of those super rich who are able to side step inheritance taxes, and pass along investments at lower rates.
I read these comments from Robert Reich in the NYTimes, which were raised in brooklynbadboy's post on the Clinton campaign:
"Where has the money gone?” asked Robert B. Reich, a secretary of labor during the Clinton administration. “That is the topic that is embarrassing for people to talk about, particularly in Washington, because even mentioning it creates the potential charge of class warfare.”
Class warfare? If there is any class warfare it has to do with income trickling up, not down.
My point is that the super rich will always lobby for advantageous policies, and tax policy is so complicated that it's difficult to keep our legislators in check. It's time to admit that the poor, middle and upper classes are all going to be tax code losers, to the One Percent without a flat tax. We can make up any resulting pinch on the poor through improving the safety net. That's a better place to enact policy in this post-Citizens United landscape.
And let's pause for a minute to talk about messaging. I'm so sick and tired of seeing how the phrase "income redistribution" is used. When Warren Buffet pays a lower effective tax rate than his assistant then we have to examine the term. If Progressives adopt a flat tax it would go a long way toward underscoring the lack of fairness in American tax policy.