Even the stingiest congressman seems uninterested in closing our $1.6 trillion federal deficit anytime soon.
So Scott Adams, most famous as the cartoonist behind Dilbert, proposed ideas to put us on a slightly slower slope down toward national default. Most of the proposals set out in his Wall Street Journal column were admittedly silly, designed to get us thinking about creative solutions. Except for one: making the highest tax brackets responsible only for welfare spending. His suggestion, though undeveloped and vague, demands every effort to make it work.
The way it works is this: say you’re one of the rich sort, with bureaucrats and executives bending over backwards to kiss the ground you walk on. If you hire some extra people right now, the government has less to pay in all kinds of benefits, but you don’t directly see that. Adams is proposing that your taxes be directly linked to those benefits, so that, although you have to spend more money hiring people, your taxes will see an immediate reduction.
But the effect of one employer spread out over all the rich people’s taxes will be tiny, so we need to concentrate it. To do this, we could take, say, the top one percent of earners, divide them into 435 geographical groups of about 3,200 people in each, and then assign a congressional district to each group with some mechanism to give the poorer districts to the richer groups. If that is not enough, even small divisions could be made, until employers see their taxes fall whenever they hire enough people. And if anyone tries to slice the Gordian knot by eliminating the poor along with poverty, the politicians of that district will fight, or risk letting their seats get written off the map after the next census.
Are some people unemployable? Then the rich can improve schools. Are the schools failing because of wretched parenting? Then the rich can reform Child Protective Services and build orphanages. If powerful people are given the opportunity to hold back more money, they will find a way. Doors will open and adversaries will be beaten back once the Gateses and Buffetts of America find they can make money doing so.
They should, in fact, support such a program; through additional donations and business expenses, which can be written off their taxes in the short-term, they can build income in the end through an improved economy and expanded production, and then receive additional tax breaks for reducing government spending.
For example, Obama’s 2011 budget proposal has $381 billion for health spending not including Medicare according to the New York Times. This nearly matches the total tax returns for the top 1 percent in 2008. If the rich had to pay for all that health spending, no matter how much it was, not only would the need for government subsidies drop along with poverty, but we can also expect overall health costs to plunge for everybody as the rich work to repair the system.
Writing these laws would be ghastly. The pages of provisions about the selection and rotation of geographical groups, how much of a burden the rich should take and all the other convoluted questions would be scorched with contention as the factions shove them around in a frenzy. But throwing social welfare onto the laps of powerful Americans is, on the face of it, elegant and logical, and deserves a trial. Also, you must remember that there are myriads of ways to implement this basic idea; the problems with my hasty thoughts on it might be easily fixed.
Once it was the responsibility of the local high-fliers to assist those stuck in the gutter, until the progressives noticed it wasn’t happening and Leviathan coerced a depersonalized charity.
This, while preventing the deepest miseries of poverty, has failed to solve its causes. Leviathan must now coerce a charity in which the benefactors themselves benefit as soon as the beneficiaries get off of benefits.
Gerard Keiser, classical languages junior
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King2012 1 year, 3 months ago
Throughout this whole article Keiser keeps referencing the rich as people who "bureaucrats and executives would bend over backwards to kiss the ground they walk on" which of course makes them appear to be bad people only out to exploit the blue collar people. But, who do you think is employing all the blue collar workers? Who is employing all the executives and the middle-class? Yes, they are rich, but they are also the people who are making a product, making a company, buying products and services from others, and making a comfortable way of life possible. To say that the rich should support specific communities is absurd. I know executives and highly paid people who already give about half their salary to taxes. If we continue to tax them then whose going to buy the services and products from the companies that everyone works for? It would go to the middle class. The middle class wouldn't be able to support an entire country's poverty and would sink lower, with them buying less also. So if everyone is spending less of their money how are any businesses supposed to make a profit to pay their workers? A country needs to be supported by economics firstly. And I can also say that, coming from a high school that instituted Robin Hood, we were forced to deal with underpaid teachers, ill qualified teachers, old equipment, and even had trash cans around the school to pick up leaks from the ceilings even though we were a fairly well-off community. The schools we gave our money to, however, all the students got laptops, all the gyms were renovated, and school field trips were more common than ever. The way to fight poverty is not always to exploit everyone above poverty level, which the taxes will eventually trickle down in to include.
bruenig 1 year, 3 months ago
King2012,
Do you understand how economies work, or more specifically do you know how taxation works. You talk about taxation as if every dollar taxed is one less dollar that is being spent on goods which will thus decrease demand and cause economic decline. But even taking a basic economics course will let you in on the insight that a dollar taxed is still a dollar spent; it's just that instead of the rich person spending it, the government does. Aggregate demand remains the same whether you spend the dollar, or whether the government spends it for you. So, the very premise of your argument here is undermined by something you should have learned in any introductory economics course (if you had to take one).
There are worthwhile arguments against higher taxation, but the claim that it reduces aggregate demand because less money will be spent is demonstrably false. What is it that you believe governments do with tax revenues -- burn them?
kdbp1213 1 year, 3 months ago
i wish i could spend more of my paycheck than the different levels of govt. i don't appreciate sending my income to another person who does not work for him/herself..........