We haven’t of late had much in the way of political “consensus” here in the United States. But we do today have one consensus of sorts — on our tax system of all things. Most everyone considers how we go about taxing ourselves to be, at best, distinctly suboptimal.
How do we change that? Where do we start? Who’s really hurting under our current tax system? Our tax “consensus” — on fundamental questions like these — breaks down immediately.
Take, for instance, the question of who’s really hurting under our current tax rules. Our contemporary political right sees America’s rich as our tax system’s biggest victims. America’s top 1 percenters, as one conservative analyst recently declared, “actually contribute more than their fair share.”
Most of our rich, with some noble exceptions, share this perspective. Indeed, observes the Henley & Partners consultancy CEO Juerg Steffen, our wealthy’s unhappiness with the U.S. tax system — and their uncertainty about the system’s future — has been generating “an unprecedented surge in affluent Americans seeking alternative residence and citizenship options.”
American progressives, by contrast, see in our current tax system an operation that essentially privileges the already privileged.
The United States, explains an Americans for Tax Reform analysis of new Congressional Budget Office data, is now sitting on its “most lopsided distribution of income” since government statisticians first started tracking that distribution. Most of this surge in inequality, the ATF goes on to note, reflects “the bonanza of capital gains”........