In each State of the Union address that President Biden has given, he has called upon Americans to pay more in taxes. No thanks.
Well, more accurately, he wants wealthy Americans to pay more in taxes. It almost seems that the wealthy are always villains in the eyes of President Biden. Speaking of this group he said, “it’s about time they started paying their fair share.”
He said, “I think it’s about time we started giving tax breaks and tax benefits to working-class families and middle-class families, instead of just the very wealthy.”
In the most recent State of the Union address, he once again emphasized the need for wealthy Americans to pay their “fair share,” promising Americans that he would support the legislature to enforce higher taxes on the higher brackets.
When the phrase ‘fair share’ is thrown around so much, it makes me wonder what that really means. Let’s examine a breakdown of the tax percentiles and portion of taxes paid. All of this data is published by the IRS. These numbers are taken from 2020.
Looking at this data, it is bizarre to me that anyone would claim that wealthy Americans do not pay their fair share. The top 1% of taxpayers pay 42% of the total federal tax income! The top 10% make up almost three-fourths of total income tax earnings!
If we really want to talk about fairness, should we look at the fact that 50% of taxpayers only contribute to 2% of the nation's tax earnings. That doesn’t seem quite fair to me.
Now, I’m not at all asking that everyone pay the same monetary value of taxes. That wouldn’t be fair either, and it wouldn’t make sense. But when the most important figure in the world calls for people to pay their “fair share,” I think it is important to understand what that means.
If we measure fairness by cash contributed, it is laughably unfair (as seen above). If we measure fairness by rate paid, under our current system, it continues to be unfair.
If President Biden wants to make the American tax system more fair, he should support a flat tax system, and remove the thousands of pages of tax codes that give loopholes and exceptions.
In a flat tax system, everyone pays the same tax rate. Currently the income tax rates are 0%-37%. Instead of one person paying 10% and another person paying 30%, wouldn’t it be more fair if everyone paid the same rate?
This is why Malcom Forbes, president and CEO of Forbes, INC has called repeatedly for a flat tax. In an op ed he wrote demanding a flat tax he said:
“If we want to do something to help families in this country, I can’t think of a better option than the flat tax. True, the across-the-board tax cuts proposed by Republican and even some Democratic leaders are an important step in the right direction and will do enormous good, but we should not stop there. We should scrap the existing tax code. Just think about what a monstrosity this code is. The Gettysburg Address runs about 200 words. The Declaration of Independence runs about 1,300 words. The Holy Bible runs about 773,000 words. But our federal income tax code runs about seven million words and is growing longer every year.”
I agree with President Biden that the American tax system is unfair. I don’t think anything he continues to do is helping with that. Let’s try something new. Something simple. Something flat.
Something fair.
