Jones Beene wrote:
Is it unfair to high earners? Not if it works. The tax code is all about redistribution of wealth because wealth-accumulation is unfair to begin with.
I do not think "fair" or "unfair" is the proper metric for this. There is nothing in the Constitution that says the US should be fair. It does say the government is responsible for maintaining the general welfare of the nation.
A large gap between wealthy and poor people disrupts the general welfare and it is highly disadvantageous to everyone. Any smart, wealthy person with enlightened self-interest will know this which is why most wealthy people support a higher percent of taxes on themselves than on other people. (Many wealthy people are smart, after all -- that's how they got that way.) This is why people like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are strongly in favor inheritance taxes, and have urged the government not to phase them out.
The issue is not fairness so much as pragmatism. Our industrial civilization excels in mass production. That is, the production of many cheap goods for many people. If ordinary people do not have enough money to buy these things our economy will collapse. If greedy wealthy people capture nearly all the income in the country, leaving middle-class people destitute, that might work out if each wealthy person wanted to own thousands of cars and refrigerators. But they do not want a thousand refrigerators, and our technology is not capable of producing only the luxury items they do want, without the mass-produced goods.
Capitalism is rather broadly defined as the exchange of labor for money. In the long-term, as robots and computers improve, human labor will be worth practically nothing. Capitalism will then collapse and we will have to find some other way to allocate money, goods and services. I think it may resemble what we now call socialism, but no one will think of it as such. As I wrote in my book, I envision a society where the ordinary necessities of life such as minimal living quarters, food, Internet access and education are considered a birthright of every person, and we hand these things out the way we hand out library cards today. The cost of these things will be trivial; a few dollars per person per day. Even if it is socialism I doubt anyone will complain -- or notice. By the time this comes about, the fight over capitalism versus socialism will be forgotten, kind of like the "Irish maid problem" circa 1900, which was a debate over the wisdom of bringing many young Irish women over to work as domestic servants, and what are we going to do if they start demanding higher pay. Nowadays we use vacuum cleaners and washing machines instead of Irish women, and the Irish have gone from being the one of the poorest, most backward civilization in Europe to being the wealthiest, most dynamic and high tech.
I do not think you can define Obama's economics. His science is the conventional sort. He wrote in his book that he firmly believes in evolution, I am relieved to say. Bush does not. That kind of thinking is the root cause of many of our present problems.
Obama resembles FDR and me: he is a fairly conservative Democrat and first and foremost a pragmatist. People who think he is a radical left-wing Democrat have not met radical Democrats.
- Jed
