PERSPECTIVE ON TAXES : In Defense of Wealth--His : It’s no sin to get rich from honest work; what stinks is giving congressional scofflaws the power to tax us.
I’m rich.
I will not apologize for that. In fact, I’m rather proud and pleased about it, because nobody gave me what I have. My dad was a letter carrier for the U.S. Postal Service. He worked pretty hard to get me raised and educated, and I helped, a little, with summer jobs that ranged from digging dirt to plumbing. In 1980 I bought my own business, and later through a lot of work and a little luck, I changed careers and now write for a living.
I’ve found that financial security gives one many things, but perversely it doesn’t change much. The most important thing it gives you is freedom from the usual middle-class worries about educating your kids. I’ll have a much easier time educating mine than Mom and Dad had with my brother and me. I have a larger house now, and when I go driving I have to decide which car to take, but the day-to-day hassles of family life don’t change. My circle of friends has grown in size, but not in character. My closest friend is someone I went to high school with. I’ve been married for nearly 23 years, and though my marriage has had as many bumps as the next person’s, it will probably survive as long as I will because I’m Catholic, and we only get one chance at that. In short, however much money I may have, I’m not all that different from the next person.
But there are some who hate me. These are mainly on the political left. They say that I don’t pay my fair share of taxes. How do they know what’s fair and what isn’t? For the record, I pay more in taxes in a year than I ever dreamed of making in a decade. And I don’t much mind. Taxes are the price of living in a civilized society. It’s being lied about that rankles me. Even worse are the people who do the lying.
Quite a few people would have you believe that the rich are idle drones. Those who say that are politicians, and perhaps they, like many, judge others by their own personal standards. They suppose we sit in our mansions and count our money like the misers in some 19th-Century novel. There’s something wrong with having a large house, or more cars than the politicians do, or in “excess consumption,” whatever that is.
When extreme-left political figures say things like that they are overlooking something. It’s something rare and endangered inside the Washington Beltway. It’s called reality.
When we built our house, all the money we spent went to workers. Carpenters, masons, plumbers, electricians, all manner of skilled craftsmen. Most, I think, were Americans with families. We exchanged our money for their skills, and when they took our money, it went to support their families. The lumber that went into the house probably came from Oregon and Washington. I hope it didn’t displace any of those precious owls, but the money we paid for it also went to American workers and their families.
Now, I’m not into private airplanes or yachts but I rather suspect that when a person buys one of those, the cost of purchase also goes to skilled workers with families. Congress decided not too long ago that people who buy such luxuries were bad people, and should be taxed for their sins. The resulting increase in price for those luxuries dissuaded lots of people from buying them, and the result was that quite a few skilled American workers lost their jobs. In deciding that Congress could get money and spend it more wisely than the people who earn the money, it ended up getting less money and putting American workers on the unemployment lines. Way to go, guys.
Of course, I don’t spend everything I make on luxury items. Most of my money goes into investments. The truly unimaginative invest in Treasury notes, lending it to the government. Some like municipal bonds, which help local governments build schools and are (horror!) tax-free, which makes it less costly for municipalities to borrow and lessens the local tax burden. But there are people working to change that, too. Or you can put it in a bank, which lends it out to businesses or to American citizens who need mortgage loans. Or you can invest in a commercial business, which generates jobs and new products. To encourage people to do this, President Bush wants to lower the tax on capital gains, but many oppose this because giving a tax break to us, the evil rich, is so bad as to invalidate the fact that investments generate jobs. They call this “fairness.” I can’t say here what I call it. My working-class background, you see.
It’s a big cycle. I make my money by providing the public with a product that people are willing to spend their money for. The same is true of newspapers, Apple Computer, General Motors or your local barber. The plain truth is that there is no way to acquire wealth other than providing the public with a product or service for which real people are willing to exchange real money.
That, I think, is a kind of public service, all the more so because people exchange their money for it voluntarily. I do not, for example, withhold a portion of anyone’s salary to pay my own. But the people who do precisely that call themselves public servants. If you disagree with them and resist paying the fee for their service, guess what happens. Prison.
This is not to say that government is not important. Government is something that we citizens have chosen to build, and we even choose the people who run it for us, after a fashion. Unfortunately, greedy people that they are, they can’t seem to get enough. They cannot balance the nation’s checkbook, and very often they cannot balance their own. People who make roughly $125,000 per year were for years bouncing checks left and right in their own little private bank. Rather like Charles Keating, less cleverly but with equal arrogance.
Frankly, I’m rather annoyed. I’m not a fat cat. My dad carried a mailbag for more than 30 years. I work pretty hard for what I get, and I get what I get through a rather democratic process. And people like myself are being excoriated by others who, in most cases, have never earned an honest living, who get their money by force of law.
I offer one modest proposal: Zero out congressional salaries. Allow people to serve in Congress, but don’t pay them for it. Some might object that such a proposal would force a lot of bright people to leave “public service.” Oh, really? It might as well be described as a means of finding out just how bright they really are and encouraging them to get a job in which they produced a product or service that we ordinary citizens were willing to spend money for--a sort of public service where the public decides the value of the service provided (without the help of the IRS). Forcing people to work for their money would limit congressional seats to those who can really achieve something within the American system. At the very least, letting the public decide the dollar-value of public servants will give humility to those who greatly need that virtue.
This will never happen, of course, but isn’t it fun to consider?
