W HAVE gotten so used to the bitter rhetoric of the enemies of tax relief — liberals and Democrats, mostly, plus much of the national media — that we no longer notice how it poisons the national discourse.
"The only thing that could explain this love of tax cuts is a lowered IQ." Thus Margaret Carlson of Time magazine, venting on a television program last weekend.
Tax cutters are "mostly Republican ideologues like Bill Archer and Dick Armey, whose primary interest is in giving tax breaks to affluent Americans." Thus leftist economist Barry Bluestone in the current issue of The New Republic.
 The federal government is awash in surplus cash, but Democrats refuse to consider returning some of that money to the taxpayers. |
"Republicans have created the illusion of paying back their wealthy supporters and corporate special interests in a bill that will never become law." Thus US Representative Pete Stark in the House debate last week.
Over and over we hear them — the insults, the slanders, the appeals to resentment and envy. It is ugly stuff, political sewer talk, and we've been listening to it for years.
"I'll be damned if I am going to let a bunch of supply-side extremists destroy our middle class to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy," declared Richard Gephardt, the House Democratic leader, in 1996. That was about the time Ted Kennedy was barking, "Keep your tax-cutting, greedy hands off our Medicare" and Nina Totenberg was telling TV viewers that "there is another word for the way they are behaving. They are behaving like whores."
It is impossible to imagine tax-cut advocates talking this way. "The only thing that can explain their aversion to tax relief is mental retardation." "Democrats want taxes to stay high so they can keep giving money to inner-city welfare leeches." Republicans would be savaged, and deservedly, if they said anything so foul. Yet the demagoguery of the liberals goes unrebuked.
The argument for tax relief is simple: Taxes should be cut because taxes are too high. Only once before has the federal government confiscated so great a proportion of the nation's economic output. That was in 1944-45, when the United States was fighting a two-front world war. Today we are not at war. Nor are we in a recession, or struggling with some natural catastrophe, or burdened with high unemployment. Yet Washington takes nearly 21 cents of every dollar of new wealth Americans create. When state and local taxes are added in, the typical family spends close to 40 percent of its income on taxes. That is more than it spends on food, clothing, shelter, and transportation — combined.
To be sure, what a "typical" family spends in taxes can be a misleading statistic. The overwhelming share of income taxes collected in this country comes from the well-to-do. The top federal tax bracket is 39.6 percent, more than 2½ times the rate for lower-income taxpayers. Millions of working Americans near the bottom of the income ladder pay no income tax at all thanks to the earned-income tax credit.
The bottom 60 percent of all taxpayers accounts for just 6 percent of the income taxes collected. By contrast, the top 8 percent of all taxpayers — anyone earning more than $100,000 — pays 62 percent of the total. This is known as soaking the rich. And it explains why any honest tax cut is going to return more dollars to the well-off than to the poor.
President Clinton ran for office promising a "middle-class tax cut." Like so much of what he says, that promise was a lie. What he (and congressional Democrats) delivered in 1993 was not a tax cut but a punitive tax increase — necessitated, he said, by the federal budget deficit.
Now that deficit is gone and the federal government is awash in surplus cash. No longer is there an excuse for taxes to be jacked up so high. It has been 18 years since Congress last enacted serious tax relief. What possible objection can there be to doing so now?
Well, says Clinton, a tax cut like the one the Republicans propose — a little under $800 billion, phased in over 10 years — "would require dramatic cuts in vital areas, such as education, the environment, biomedical research, defense, and crime fighting." But this, too, is a lie. The GOP tax cuts would have no effect on spending; their impact would simply be to reduce the $1 trillion surplus in income tax revenues that Washington now anticipates.
"Last week, in the House of Representatives, they passed an irresponsible tax bill that would spend our surplus," Clinton said on Tuesday. Hear that? "Our surplus." That is how the liberal mind works: The money belongs to the government, even if the government doesn't need it.
And the government doesn't need it, as Clinton himself admitted on one of the rare occasions when he actually told the truth. Speaking of the 1993 tax hike, he told a Houston audience in 1995: "You think I raised your taxes too much. Well, it might surprise you to know I think I raised them too much, too." (A few days later Clinton retracted his statement; his unaccustomed lapse into the truth was caused, he said, by ignoring his mother's advice to "never give a talk after 7 o'clock at night.")
The tax debate boils down to a straightforward question: Should you be allowed to keep a little more of your own income? Republicans vote yes; they trust you to spend the extra dollars sensibly. Democrats, with some honorable exceptions, vote no; they think you are too stupid to be trusted. But the Democrats can't say what they really think. So they resort to insults instead.
Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.
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