Today is April 15. You have probably filed your income tax return. It is unlikely you are wondering whether you paid your fair share. However, others are. That much I can tell you. The Wall Street Journal takes up the issue with a look at the most recent data in a timely editorial. Analyze this:
Tax Day has arrived again, and our April 15 condolences to those who pay the bulk of the nation’s bills. It’s a smaller group than many Americans realize, and those figures bear repeating, as Democrats renew their line that the rich won’t pay their “fair share.”
Sen. Cory Booker has a bill to raise the top individual income-tax rate to 43%, from today’s 37%. Sen. Chris Van Hollen wants 49%. Both proposals would also eliminate income taxation for many lower earners.
“My bill would guarantee no income tax on the first $75,000 families earn,” Mr. Booker said last month. He claimed this would “help restore tax fairness.” Mr. Van Hollen’s legislation, according to his press release, would end income taxation for those making under $46,000, while providing “a significant tax break” to individuals up to $80,500.
Yet the notion that America’s income tax is biased against the working class is a progressive fantasy. According to the official numbers from the IRS, the top 1% of income-tax filers in 2022 contributed 40.4% of the revenue. The top 10% of filers paid 72%. The top quarter contributed 87.2%.
John and I took up the same issue in our 2005 American Enterprise essay that I recently posted on Power Line in “Talking about income taxes.” We took up the larger issue that frames this one in “The Truth About Income Inequality,” published by the Center of the American Experiment in 1995. In that essay we concluded (footnote omitted):
The “equality” espoused by the critics of income inequality is equality of outcome or of result. This notion of equality appropriates the language of America’s founders, but it nevertheless strikes at the heart of the founders’ understanding of equality, which was based on equality of rights. For the founders understood that equality of outcome is impossible and undesirable, given the different abilities with which each person is born. Thus James Madison wrote in the most celebrated of the Federalist papers that the “first object of government” is protecting the “different and unequal faculties of acquiring property” which necessarily results in the “possession of different degrees and kinds of property,” or inequality of outcome. The liberal critics of income inequality have an argument not just with the facts or with their current political adversaries, but with the authors of the American Constitution itself.
The song remains the same.
