Sunday, September 21, 2008

Taxation, Altruism, and Patriotism

David Harsanyi was not impressed when Joe Biden tried to convince us this week that taxation was "patriotic". David does his usual persuasive writing here, putting into perspective the differences between coercion, altruism, and patriotism.

Harsanyi also has some interesting facts about who pays what percentage of taxes. For example, did you know that in 1980, when the top income tax rate was 70 percent, the share of income taxes paid by the top 1 percent of taxpayers was less than 20 percent? Now, with their tax rate being less than 40 percent, the top one percent pay nearly 40 percent of all income taxes.

Although Biden is a multi-millionaire, he has given an average of $369 per year to charity in the last decade. I agree with Harsanyi that it is your money, through the coercion of taxation, not Biden's, through altruism, that Biden wants to be patriotically redistributed.

Biden should be especially happy to know that taxpayers are now going to be coerced into paying perhaps as much as an additonal 1 trillion dollars in the government plan being worked out this weekend to buy up financial institutions' bad debt. Patriotism abounds!

1 comment:

Terri Wagner said...

ONe wonders if Biden is that dumb or he has been given marching orders and Hillary will ride in to save the Obama campaign or if Biden was a mole put in by Hillary to ensure Obama'a failure or if the Democratic party is really that stupid or is Obama that atupid or does Biden actually believe this or...well you get the picture.