My, how my e-mail box bulges with responses to my recent critique of President Bush’s proposed tax cuts:
(Names have been abbreviated to protect the innocent and the wacky.)
Mr. Page: I thought a columnist of your stature would have the journalistic integrity (Or is that an oxymoron?) to argue against the Bush tax-cut proposal with facts and your alternatives rather than just misleading innuendoes.
For example, you neglected to mention that both Presidents [Bill] Clinton and [Jimmy] Carter also proposed eliminating double taxation of dividends, and that everyone with a 401(k) plan would benefit from it.
John Q., Sacramento
Comment: Not really, since withdrawals from 401(k) plans after retirement would still be taxed. But, I understand the confusion. I’ve heard from quite a few people who read into the Bush tax cut instead of actually reading it. They probably figure that’s what us commentators are for.
Mr. Page: I read your column and am wondering if you want to protect the poor so much that you are willing to burden the rich? The rich control companies and jobs. If the tax burden is too high here they will move their money and their companies to places with less burden to avoid the taxes. Then we would have less jobs and more unemployed poor.
John C. (No hometown given)
Comment: Cheer up. If you want to move to a lower-tax country, you don’t have a lot of choices. Americans rank 28 out of 30 industrialized nations for total tax burdens by our national government (26.02 percent of our gross domestic product), according to 1999 figures from the Organization of Economic Development and Cooperation. That compares to 52 percent for Sweden and 49 percent for Denmark.
Only Korea (24 percent) and Mexico (17 percent) beat us. Bon voyage. I hear Guadalajara is nice this time of year.
Dear Mr. Page: I make $30,000 a year and do not want to pay any more taxes than I do now. However, the rich, or those whose yearly income is above $75,000, deserve a tax break because they are paying a higher percentage of all the taxes collect in the U.S.
Why do you hate high-income earners and Republicans alike?
Tim S. M., Lafayette, La.
Comment: Let’s see: At $30,000, you would save an estimated average of about $351 under Bush’s plan or $361 under the Democrat’s plan, according to estimates for all types of filers by the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center. Either way, that’s less than a dollar a day.
Since you asked, that compares to about $1,776 saved by the $75,000 to $100,000 bracket (or $510 under the Democrats’ plan.)
But rest assured that I don’t hate rich people, Republicans or right-wingers, Tim. What the world needs now is love, sweet love.
I mainly question whether the “stimulus” of that cut is worth deepening the deficit. Large tax cuts do not serve the long-term interests of the wealthy, either, when they deepen deficits and drag the economy down. But, as the president says, it’s your money.
Mr. Page: What you actually wrote was the same tired skewered rhetoric that I have heard and read for decades. What you didn’t write was a list of benefits, included in the plan, that are bestowed on the segment of our society that contributes absolutely nothing.
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Sam F. (No town)
Comment: “Absolutely nothing?” Are you talking about those low-wage workers who drive taxis, and clean hotel rooms and serve coffee around the clock? Maybe you’d rather receive your coffee in your lap?
Are you referring to the $12,000-a-year earners who The Wall Street Journal called “lucky duckies” in a Nov. 20 editorial (headlined “The non-taxpaying class”) about how low-income people don’t pay enough taxes.
Yes, class envy is a terrible self-defeating thing, especially when it is envy of the poor.
Mr. Page: How do you define “rich,” anyway?
Mr. and Mrs. Fred D., Greensboro, N.C.
Comment: People who are at the opposite end of the income scale from “poor.”
But your question is a sound one. Americans don’t like to talk about class, yet, like to think that they are experts about it anyway. A Time magazine survey found that 19 percent of Americans believe they have incomes within the top 1 percent. (Hello? The critics must be right about the state of American education.)
Another 20 percent believe they will be within the top 1 percent one day. No wonder Americans are awash in credit-card debt–and show so little concern for the deficit that our national budget is slipping back into.
But I wish all of my fellow optimists luck. We Americans are nothing without our dreams. At the rate we’re going economically, dreams are all that some of us are going to have left.
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