Letters to the Editor: Taxes are supposed to benefit the common citizen, not the super-rich

To the editor: A letter writer commented that the idea of increasing taxes on the wealthy is both unfair and a bad solution to inequality (“Letters to the Editor: California already has proven that high taxes on the rich don’t work,” Sept. 17). Here are three reasons that defense of the very wealthy is misplaced.

First, rich taxpayers aren’t really taxed on the true value of their income because most wealth revenue is barely taxed at all. Taxes, broadly, are taken from wages and salaries. The wealthy earn money from leveraging loans, capital gains and interest on investments. They pay pennies on the dollar in taxes.

Second, the wealthy don’t put money into the economy like wage-earners do. A family earning $80,000 spends virtually all their income in the local economy; housing, food, insurance, other goods and services. A wealthy household can’t spend anything close to their income on themselves or their businesses. Most is kept in the bank or sheltered, unavailable for public benefit.

Finally, it’s obvious that the wealthy don’t really feel the tax bite that middle-class taxpayers do. If you earn $100 million, your rich-person’s lifestyle is completely isolated from your tax liability. Even if you paid 50% of that in taxes, you’d still struggle to spend a fraction of the $50 million you have left. A moderate-income taxpayer sees their taxes as a zero-sum financial shuffle that literally takes money out of their pockets that they could otherwise use to benefit themselves.

Most of these points are well known, but they’re rarely acknowledged by anti-tax proponents. We should think instead of the societal values that taxes are designed for: social benefits for the common citizen, not the .1% of the super-rich.

Eric Oxenberg, Camarillo