tax lies spiraling to random mumblings

ugh. when i contemplate the lies that go behind the perpetuation of the idea that a flat tax rate is the “fair” thing to do, it makes me ill. it assumes that there is no minimum cost of living. it assumes that people aren’t abusing tax shelters. it assumes that the earnings from investments should be taxed the same way as earning from a job. it assumes that people will always be stuck in the same economic bracket, that people are permanently tied to their “class”, with the poor always benefitting and the rich always paying for the poor, which is completely backwards of the real situation.

the other day, i did a quick calculation to see how much i can save in taxes if i put away $13K a year into something legit, like 401(k), and not even some bogus tax shelter. i save almost 14% on the taxes i *should* pay on my full wages, according to a flat tax rate calculation. yet, if a person makes $13K a year, they must pay taxes on all of it, as they clearly won’t have enough to put away into a tax-deductable account, on top of barely making ends meet. that means that if you have money, you can have even more money for no additional work. wow, flat taxes seem really fair, don’t they. $13K a year is what they would make if they earned roughly $6.50 an hour. that’s higher than the national minimum wage. could you pay rent at the crappiest place with that money?

as a person in a pretty damn high tax bracket, i am completely willing and able to pay my full taxes and be happy about the fact and not be an ass about how the government is taking my money. well, maybe not for this administration, as they are clearly masters of squandering the nation’s hard earned money. but the general point is that i feel like i was able to get to where i am and become a highly functional contributing member of society because of the “breaks” given to me. so i’m paying back society for that now. taxes are part and parcel of the bigger picture where we try to move forward as a society. we can’t pay for useful programs without resources.

because my family was poor, even though my parents worked like dogs, i got free school lunches. because my family was poor, i got grants and low-interest school loans. because my family was poor and i worked hard, i got a small scholarship during high school to help pay for bus tokens. growing up, it was deeply and painfully embarrassing to get called up to get my lunch tickets because it branded me as poor. people used to make fun of me and say that i picked my clothes out of the garbage, which stung because a lot of the clothes we wore were in fact donations.

i know how important it is to give people a chance. just because someone is poor and from a bad neighborhood and maybe doesn’t talk quite right, whether it’s a foreign accent with broken english, or ghetto-ized slang, or a red-neck accent, it doesn’t mean that they don’t want to make something of themselves. it doesn’t mean they should be dismissed as ignorant and backwards. and it doesn’t mean that they are just sucking on the nation’s wealth with no ability or willingness to pay it back.

there are at least two potential ways they can go: they can be minimum wage earners (or less) all their lives and never make anything of themselves and make a minimal contribution to the nation’s wealth/economy, or they can get some financial breaks to go to school and become a part of the middle or upper economic class, contributing more to the nation in terms of money and a political voice, providing well for the forward progress of the next generation. it’s an extreme oversimplification of the situation, but that is the divide i see between myself and some people i went to grade school with. it is the divide i see between me and some of my family members.

a flat tax rate means that if the total money brought in by taxes is not enough, then taxes have to be raised for everyone, which hurts the poorest the most in an immediate sense. a person of means, or even a person of no means, may think this is fair because they are paying the same relative amounts. again, i assert that this mentality might make sense if you assume that the poor and rich are different people, but not if you think of them as different phases of the same people’s lives, with upward mobility. it’s only when you rule out upward mobility that it could seem fair.

i think it’s fairer for me to have gotten tax (and other) breaks for a few years while i was struggling, so that i can move on to a more stable economic class and more than make up for it with decades of hard-work. does that seem unfair? it is, in essence, a loan i took against my future. and i am giving back with ample interest. and i’m happy about it, because without that, i wouldn’t ever be where i am.

i protest that i am just a thinking person and not an economist, and admit that i’m definitely dealing on a microeconomic scale with no sense of a macro impact. but i see the way america worked for me, and i see how it might be able to work for others, if only given the chance or hope for chance.

eta: the other thing is that if a well-off person says, “i never borrowed from the county, so why should i always be paying for it?” here is some news for you: if you’ve always been wealthy, you didn’t earn it*, so stop grumbling about your “hard work”.

* by “it”, i mean the base wealth difference between you and a truly poor person when you started out in life.