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President Bush’s speech before Congress pointed out
tax cuts are required in order to jump-start a sputtering
economy, and our surplus is large enough to support such a cut.
This argument is so right that the tax cut should be much larger
than it is. However, one aspect of the Democratic response to
Bush’s speech needs to be critiqued on a philosophical basis.
The long-running mantra of the Democratic Party is that
Republicans want to cut taxes simply because they want to help
the rich. Part of this is self-serving rhetoric; after all,
Bush’s tax cut plan contains larger tax cuts for the
middle-class than the Democratic counterpart does. The Bush tax
plan also contains tax cuts for lower-income groups that are
larger in percentage terms than the tax cuts for upper-income
groups. However, this liberal criticism raises a legitimate
question: why should rich people pay less in taxes?
One’s answer to this question depends to a great extent upon
one’s ideological stance on the role of government. For those
who believe that the less government the better, any loss of
absolute or relative power of the government is a gain for
society. However, for those who view government as an
indispensable or just useful instrument for insuring equity
within a society, any argument that the wealthy should pay less
in taxes is not going to win any converts. This latter group is
the one that has to be won over if deeper tax cuts are to be
enacted, and because of that, I would argue that proclaiming the
rich “deserve a tax cut” should be scrapped.
A leftist friend of mine believes that the Republican Party as a
whole has a sense of entitlement about its “right” to rule
and its right to provide itself with less taxes to its
“clients”. I would counter that the Republican Party cannot
merely be described as rich exclusively, because otherwise they
would never win any elections. Most people who vote Republican
are not rich. Many rich people do not vote Republican. Still,
saying that the rich “deserve” a tax cut is to identify with
a group of people who, when all is said and done, do not need
any help.
Human beings have a tendency to identify themselves with the
plight of the powerful. This tendency may be a natural one, as
the instinct for survival and advancement leads people to cater
their mindset to those who can help them instead of those who
cannot. Maybe people are natural social climbers as well.
(Anyone who has been employed anywhere will notice that certain
people “kiss up” to those above them and
“kick down” those below them.) Or maybe society is
responsible for this condition, as we place greater importance
on those on the top, despite occasional platitudes to the
contrary. (If you turn on a TV at any time, you’ll see
entertainment shows that discuss the rich and powerful in
Hollywood, political and business news shows that discuss the
rich and powerful in Washington, and content that venerates the
rich and powerful everywhere else.)
But
regardless of whether human beings are born or bred to concern
themselves with the fortunate, this is a mindset that should be
counteracted whenever possible. The vast majority of people in
this world are motivated by a desire for significance from
others rather than by a love, broadly defined, for others, but
this is a trend worth avoiding.
So what does this have to do with tax cuts? Well, if supporters
for tax cuts argue that the rich deserve lower taxes on the
basis that they’re the producers in our society and need to be
rewarded for this reason, they won’t get very far. Such an
argument assumes that other members of our society aren’t as
productive, when in fact they make the wealth of capital-holders
possible in the first place. It also leaves the impression,
correctly or otherwise, that the rich have a special status just
because they are rich.
It would be better to stress that tax cuts would benefit the
bottom earners the most, precisely because we live in a
hierarchical, top-down society. A tax cut may make a rich person
richer, but more importantly, it may make the difference between
someone keeping or losing his or her job. Indeed, a tax cut
means hundreds of thousands of jobs gained or lost in the next
couple of years alone. Labor depends on capital to exist, and if
capital is less plentiful, then labor is less plentiful as well.
This insight may be very difficult to translate into a sunny and
reassuring stump speech, but I believe it needs to be tried. A
positive spin of this message is that “we are all in this
together.” And we are. Rich people, like it or not, make large
investments possible. Some merely will merely indulge
themselves, but others will make the investments that will make
the advancements in technologies like computer chips and wind
and solar power, or new businesses and jobs: in short, our
common future.
Much of what constitutes politics pits the strong against the
strong, and I realize more and more every day that I have no dog
in that fight. However, I am interested in seeing the economy
resurrect itself, and in living in a society where tax revenues
and private opportunities of all kinds are optimized. Bush’s
plan is a small step in the right direction, but it should be
defended for the right reasons.
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