Beyond Labels

It’s a great sound bite: “The [wealthy/corporations/etc.] should pay their fair share.” Who can argue with that? Particularly if the group who are implied to be not paying their fair share are someone (or something) that isn’t “us.”

So this coming Monday, we’ll explore this concept, in particular with regard to taxation and similar financial policies.

Here are some starter questions to consider:

• What is the “fair share” for the wealthy (let’s say the top 1% of the population)?
  • Should this be measured by income? By wealth? By a combination of both?
• What is the corresponding “fair share” for middle- and lower-income families?
• Should fairness of share be measured in individual components (federal income tax, state and local income tax, local property tax, Medicare tax, Social Security tax, unemployment tax, state and local sales tax, excise tax, gasoline tax, etc. etc. etc.)?
  • Or should fairness be considered more holistically, either combining all of these contributions into a single bucket or several big buckets (federal, state, local)? Or something else?
• Are income tax rates too low? Are there too many deductions and credits? Are they not sufficiently progressive?
• If we were to adopt ProPublica’s “true tax rate” (which includes annual increase in wealth in “income”—see link below), shouldn’t it be a two-way adjustment (i.e., tax refunds for decreases in wealth)?

I think it would be interesting to play “king for a day:” If you could singlehandedly change the way Americans contribute (financially) to support the services provided by federal, state, and local governments, what would you do?

Here are some resources:

• The ProPublica article reporting on “Secret IRS Files” for several wealthy Americans that has reignited the discussion
• A Tax Foundation study examining 41 countries’ taxation of high income individuals—it is useful in the sense that it attempts to incorporate income, payroll, and consumption taxes, together with social contributions, into their country-by-country comparison
• A Council on Foreign Relations “backgrounder” on a variety of approaches to rejiggering the U.S. tax system, prepared for the 2020 election season.
• Another Tax Foundation piece focusing on U.S. tax progressivity. Unfortunately, it only covers income taxes and not other, typically regressive, elements like sales taxes.

We’ll discuss the President’s trip last week to meet with the G-7 leaders, NATO, and Vladimir Putin. How’d it go?

Senator Joe Manchin recently wrote that he will not support the “For the People Act,” calling it too partisan. But he also wrote that he would support the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which has bipartisan support.

This coming Monday, we’ll discuss federal and state legislation to modify the rules and regulations for voting in federal elections. In particular, we agreed that we would all explore what “principled objections to the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act” might be. (The hope—at least mine—is that this exercise might help us move away from cable news/politicians’ talking points into a more nuanced consideration of the issues.)

Another exercise would be to put ourselves in a Senator’s shoes—what amendments, if any, to the Act do we think would make it better. (Needless to say, we should be ready to defend our suggestions.)

Here are some resources that Michael Sinclair identifed to help us get started:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lewis_Voting_Rights_Act (this is a summary of the 2020 version of the bill; I understand that the 2021 version is still in committee in the House)
2. https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/4263/text (this is the full text of the most recent version of the bill)
3. https://www.heritage.org/election-integrity/commentary/against-the-john-lewis-voting-rights-advancement-act (dated 1 February 2021, from the Heritage Foundation web site)
4. https://yubanet.com/opinions/fred-wertheimer-john-lewis-voting-rights-act-will-have-no-impact-on-state-voter-suppression-laws-enacted-before-act-becomes-law/ (dated 18 May 2021, from the Democracy 21 web site; Fred Wertheimer held several positions with Common Cause, the last as President from 1991 to 1995)