gracchusdixit

The controversy surrounding Mitt Romney’s tax returns— his long-standing reluctance to release them, what they reveal about his wealth, where he hides his money, how much (or little) tax he actually pays—has finally put the whole question of taxation at the forefront of political debate. It’s about time. Taxation is the defining force in any society. How we tax determines the difference between winners and losers, the powerful and the powerless, opportunity and despair.

The debate about raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans has thus far focused on two arguments, one practical, the other ethical.

The practical argument of those who propose raising taxes is that no amount of budget cutting in the world is going to be able to reduce our public debt, so the need to raise more money is simple common sense, and the logical place to get that money is from those who have benefitted the most from the tax policies of the last 25 years. The ethical argument concerns the fairness—or lack of it—in the way income and wealth are now distributed in our country, with the top one percent of the population having the biggest share of the nation’s wealth since the Gilded Age.

Those on the right, of course, dispute both arguments. To the practical argument, they make the counterclaim that higher taxes “kill jobs” and penalize “job creators,” despite the fact that history provides little evidence to support such a notion. To the ethical argument, they say that life is intrinsically unfair or, if that sounds rather heartless to you, that wealth should go to those who “earn it”. To everyone else, they say: “stop whining” and get a job.

The trouble is that neither side is even close to winning this debate on either practical or ethical grounds. The claims and counterclaims are simply irreconcilable, because neither side can agree on the same set of facts, let alone the same philosophical point of view.

There is, however, a third—and far more important—argument for raising taxes on the very rich. It is that excessive wealth and democratic freedom are fundamentally incompatible.

It has been said that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The same can be said of money. Too much money in the hands of the few—be they private individuals or corporations—inevitably leads to the corruption of democratic institutions. Concentrated wealth is like a loaded gun, a weapon that allows those who possess it to kidnap public policy and hold the public good for ransom. It enables the wealthy few to buy anybody and anything they want, including the democratic process itself.

And that is precisely what putting too much money in the hands of the few has done. We didn’t get a public health insurance option, because the private insurance companies spent millions smearing such an option as “socialism”. We’ve done nothing about climate change, because the oil companies spent millions trying to obscure and deny the scientific evidence. We got a financial collapse in 2008, because the investment banks spent millions to overturn the regulations that once reined in their reckless behavior. It was money—vast, unlimited amounts of money—that made such calamities possible.

Now, thanks to five of the nine Justices of the Supreme Court, untold sums are pouring secretly into the Presidential election campaign. Our future is being bought, lock, stock, and barrel, by the people Theodore Roosevelt once called the “malefactors of great wealth”. They and their surrogates—the lobbyists, the phony think-tanks, the paid pundits —are co-opting our democracy and purchasing our elected representatives to serve their own greedy interests.

In the Bible, it says: “Greed is the root of all evil”. There is only one way to root out the evil that is destroying our democracy—by taxing it to death. Under Dwight David Eisenhower, the Republican President who warned us against the dangers of the “military- industrial complex,” the top marginal tax rate was 91 percent and corporate taxes were triple what they are today. That might be a good place to start.