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Bruce Lohof<\/p><\/div>\n
The United States began its flirtation with a flat tax during the Civil War. In the 20th century the romance ran the gamut from left-of-center (when presidential hopeful Jerry Brown supported it in 1992) to the right (when Steve Forbes talked it up in 1996 and 2000). Current presidential aspirants Ben Carson, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul flirt with a flat tax. So does Marco Rubio, although he prefers one rate for the poor, another for the middle and a third for the rich.<\/p>\n
In how many ways are all of these flat-taxers wrong? At least four:<\/p>\n
One, flat-tax schemes won\u2019t pay the bill<\/strong>. Ben Carson initially advocated a flat tax of 10 percent, a tithe, something that he\u2019d read in the Bible. When he learned, to quote Gershwin, that it \u201cAin’t Necessarily So,\u201d Carson moved to 15 percent, only to discover that, even then, his scheme would generate an additional deficit of $1.1 trillion per year. Cruz hasn\u2019t budged from the tithe: \u201cUnder the Cruz Simple Flat Tax,\u201d his website says, current \u201crates of personal income tax will collapse into a single low rate of 10 percent.\u201d<\/p>\n Other candidates use other numbers. Paul has landed on 14.5 percent. Rubio\u2019s multiple brackets are 15, 25, and 35 percent. The bottom line, though: none of these plans pays for the government that the public wants. (Perhaps, though, they\u2019d pay for the government that the candidates<\/em> want. Just sayin\u2019.)<\/p>\n Two, flat-tax schemes are unfair<\/strong>. For 103 years, American tax policies have been progressive: tax rates correlate with income, i.e., the more you earn the higher your tax rate. Fair enough. The highest rate, 39.6 percent, is merely onerous if your income is a half million dollars a year. If your income is $18,550\u2014the top dollar in the bottom bracket\u201439.6 percent would not be onerous but catastrophic. On the other hand, if you earned a half million a year but paid the bottom bracket of 10 percent, your taxes would seem like pocket change.<\/p>\n But it isn\u2019t just tax rates that correlate with income. Benefits correlate, too. In his 2012 presidential campaign Mitt Romney divided American voters into \u201cmakers\u201d and \u201ctakers,\u201d the \u201ctakers\u201d being folks who \u201cbelieve the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.\u201d<\/p>\n
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<\/a><\/div><\/div>He was, well, wrong. A few government programs benefit \u201ctakers\u201d only: Medicaid and food stamps, for instance. Mostly, though, both \u201ctakers\u201d and \u201cmakers\u201d are beneficiaries. Do only the poor benefit from defense expenditures, or Medicare or Social Security programs? Don\u2019t you need an automobile or an airplane ticket to take advantage of the nation\u2019s interstate highways or its airports? And perhaps it\u2019s best not to mention how the \u201cbenefits\u201d of our criminal justice system morph as we move from poverty through affluence and into actual wealth.<\/p>\n