Taxed Till They're Blue in the Face

Froma Harrop is in a lather because the "blue states", whose residents favor big-government programs and high taxation, have a "disproportionate" number of middle class residents who face the alternative minimum tax. In other words, she's unhappy that the biggest fans of the welfare state get their just deserts at tax time!

Big-hearted liberals, your writer included, can agree that the rich should shoulder more of the tax burden than the less fortunate. The problem is defining who is rich.

Incomes are higher in the blue states, but so generally is the price of housing and everything else. A family making $90,000 in Nutley, N.J., can barely maintain a middle-class existence. Yet by national standards, that family is in the top 25 percent for income. Were this household to move to Tulsa with its $90,000 income intact, it would be living high. But the federal tax code makes no distinction between what it takes to be middle class in Oklahoma and in New Jersey. As a result, the high-income regions -- the generally liberal coasts and upper Midwest -- get milked.

The alternative minimum tax multiplies the regional inequities. Dubbed the blue-state tax, it was created in 1969 to ensure that the top earners pay at least some federal income taxes. (Back then, reports of millionaires' paying no taxes scandalized Americans.)

Wah! And about the higher cost of living in these blue states.... It's largely self-inflicted. These states saddle themselves with additional taxation and regulatory burdens. Unions make labor costs artificially high. And, as Thomas Sowell points out, the blue-staters themselves are responsible for legislating themselves out of affordable housing -- or into massive appreciation, as the case may be.

But lest you get excited about seeing Froma Harrop calling for an actual tax cut, read on.

Conservatives have been prancing around at the sight of liberals demanding that a tax be muzzled. The Wall Street Journal editorial page says it teaches blue-state politicians a lesson and urges them to get with the Republican program to lessen reliance on the income tax.

They ought to sign on. There's nothing to stop liberal states from collecting some of the taxes their top plutocrats no longer send to Washington. Some are already doing it and spending the money on their own priorities.

...

Liberal America should embrace tax reform that serves its interests -- and totally without guilt. It's been carrying the load for far too long. [bold added]

I'll pass over whether Harrop includes "those in the middle class who were subject to the AMT" among her "plutocrats" suddenly relieved of part of their federal tax burden. She just wants a different set of legalized criminals passing out the loot after it is confiscated as taxes.

I don't know what's more galling here. Is it Harrop's definition of "self-interest" that seems to apply, not to our federal government, but to smaller state and local governments -- but yet not, mysteriously, to individual human beings? Or is it her chauvinistic altruism, which somehow regards wealth transfers okay -- as long as they don't go to "flyover country"? Is it Harrop's collectivist notion that the sin of earning money is to be punished by taxation, or is it her capricious assignment of who gets to be the leech and who gets their blood sucked out?

If government redistribution of wealth is so good, why not tax those wealthy blue staters more? (Aren't the blue states better places to live anyway? If so, shouldn't those of us in the red states, poorer by that measure, reap the largesse?) And if taxation is so bad, why not eliminate it for everyone? Harrop either does not know or does not care that she is contradicting herself here.

What, Mizz Harrop, is wrong with eliminating taxation entirely so individuals in the blue states can spend money "on their own priorities", "totally without guilt", even if it means those in the red states would, alas, be able to do the same? Haven't the wealthy been "carrying the load far too long"? By what right do we plunder anyone's wealth?

These questions are just the tip of the iceberg of what I'd like to ask Froma Harrop and her fellow travelers, whose thinking is so disorganized they nearly can't string together three sentences without contradicting themselves. The only things one can count on when reading such screeds is that one's intelligence will be insulted, and that the insult will be far exceeded by one's astonishment at the degree of presumptuousness required of someone who would divide the human race into the looters and the looted.

The mind boggles.

-- CAV