Welcome to my world

By Camille Paglia

Mar 30, 2001 | Read the story.

I cannot believe you bought the "the rich need a tax cut because it's their money" bulldada! How did the rich "make" their money? They made it by having people that work hard for them create their profits. Rich people do not work harder than, say, somebody scrubbing toilets, collecting garbage or cooking food for children at public schools.

However, rich people, after growing richer and richer over the last five decades as middle- and lower-class incomes have stagnated or shrunk, deserve a tax cut since it's their money? The average person making $25,000 a year will get around $50 from the current Bush proposal, while somebody making a million a year will get back around $45,000. Who needs the money more?

Would it not make much more sense to have a payroll tax cut? This would not only give money to those who actually need it, but it will also allow businesses to hire more people since their payroll taxes would be reduced too.

-- Craig Joyner

It's not the fact of a tax cut, but the message it sends investors. What we are telling the world is that we have no interest in deficit reduction. Imagine you are Saud or whoever and the CEO of the company was Clinton, a bright boy with some personal problems, who's been telling you that we are good for our debt. Now we have this nebbish who says forget about the debt. Where would you invest?

-- Daniel Meyer

I agree with the logic that those who pay the most should get the most reduction in a tax cut. However, what we miss here is the debate about whether the current rate structure is appropriate. Should we be burdening at all the people who are mostly stuck in low-paying or dead-end jobs? I would love to see a day that if you made $50,000 or less, you do not have to pay any tax.

-- Kish Vora

After many years of prosperity during the '90s, the big investors got sloppy in their thinking and were pulled into the dot-com hype hook, line and sinker. The bubble has burst, and it's time to cut the fat out of the economy. A mammoth (and retroactive) tax cut as Bush is currently attempting to push through will only reinforce a perception that the economic slowdown has come about by some sort of accident, as opposed to investors simply making bad investment decisions.

-- Jared Pearson

I wanted to take issue with your remarks on the need for drastic tax cutting. I am speaking here semi-professionally, as an economics professor (currently at Purdue, but I taught at the University of Chicago for five years, so my conservative bona fides are in order).

It is not the case that the rich pay an overwhelming portion of taxes. They pay an overwhelming portion of income taxes. When you figure in payroll taxes and sales taxes, the distribution skews much more strongly toward the poor and middle-income Americans. This is because payroll taxes are only levied on the first (roughly) $70,000 of income, so you effectively pay 13 percent of every dollar of income up to that point, and nothing thereafter. Of course, the fraction of income that is consumed falls rapidly with income, so the rich pay a much lower percentage of their income in sales taxes. These other taxes comprise roughly 45 percent of the federal budget, and a much higher percentage of state and local budgets.

By defining the debate in terms of income taxes, rather than the entire tax burden, the Bush camp has made a reasonable case for a tax cut skewed heavily toward the wealthy. Now perhaps a case could be made that the wealthy should pay a lower burden than the rest of us, or that there is a particular reason to pay attention to income taxes rather than all the other taxes that eat away at our paychecks. But the Bush camp is not making this case; they are trusting in the public's inability to uncover this fundamental dishonesty.

-- David Hummels

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