It seems a long time since we have had an old-fashioned tax debate, and no wonder.
After all, with the establishment-dominated and deep-state controlled federal government fleecing posterity to pay for endless foreign wars, mandating experimental medical treatments approved for emergency use, censoring citizens’ speech online and arresting political opponents, we have had bigger fish to fry.
Thanks to President Joe Biden’s proposed fiscal year 2025 budget, however, the prospect of a record-high top capital gains and qualified dividends tax rate of 44.6 percent has spawned a classic clash between a conservative- or libertarian-minded opponent who decries the proposed increase on one hand, and an academic liberal spouting nonsense about billionaires paying their fair share on the other.
Americans who grew up in the 1980s have good reason to pity those who did not. Now, it seems that Biden’s budget has taken us back to that glorious decade.
On the conservative-libertarian side, John Kartch of Americans for Tax Reform blasted the proposed tax increase.
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Among other things, the proposal would swell the top rate to its highest level since the capital gains tax’s introduction in 1922.
Furthermore, it would compound tax burdens imposed by state governments.
“Under the Biden proposal, the combined federal-state capital gains tax exceeds 50% in many states,” Kartch wrote.
Worse yet, the tax increase threatens to confiscate wealth generated by ordinary families in the course of a lifetime.
Are taxes being levied and used responsibly by American leaders?
“Many hard working couples who started a small business at age 25 who now wish to sell the business at age 65 will face the Biden proposed 44.6% top rate, plus state capital gains taxes,” Kartch added. “And much of that ‘gain’ isn’t real due to inflation. But they’ll owe tax on it.”
On the other side, Forbes contributor Andrew Leahey — an attorney who teaches at Drexel Kline School of Law — channeled his inner 1980s liberal by describing the proposed tax increase as no big deal for most Americans.
The 44.6% rate, Leahey wrote, would “only apply to those individuals with taxable income above $1 million and investment income above $400,000.”
In other words, ordinary Americans should not care, because rich people — you guessed it — need to pay their fair share.
“The policy proposal is much more incremental than revolutionary — aimed, albeit in a small way, at ensuring high earners contribute a fairer portion relative to their massive financial undertakings,” Leahey wrote.
Furthermore, “American billionaires” already pay a low income-tax rate, “which might cast them as somewhat less deserving of victim status in the eyes of the average taxpayer.”
Note the slippery manner in which Leahey shifted focus from “individuals with taxable income above $1 million and investment income above $400,000” to “American billionaires” unworthy of sympathy.
The point, of course, is not whether billionaires deserve pity, but what kind of government we tolerate.
According to U.S. News & World Report, suburbs of Washington, D.C., accounted for five of the 10 richest U.S. counties by median household income in 2023. These included Howard County, Maryland, and Arlington, Fairfax, Falls Church and Loudoun counties in Virginia.
That can only happen when a government confiscates wealth at a criminal level.
And what have Americans received in exchange for that gargantuan wealth transfer? Well, for one thing, stealing Americans’ money has empowered elected representatives to wave Ukraine flags on the floor of Congress.
Speaking of representatives, American schoolchildren often learn that their 18th-century ancestors objected to “taxation without representation.”
At best, that amounts to a sanitized version of the truth. It suggests — I believe deliberately — that citizens should not object to taxation as long as their elected representatives impose it.
But the great men of the Founding Era did not fight for representation alone. They fought a tyrannical government that used taxes to destroy liberty.
John Adams, for instance, did not oppose the 1765 Stamp Act because its authors did not properly represent him. Instead, he denounced the tax scheme itself in conspiratorial language.
“There seems to be a direct and formal design on foot, to enslave all America,” Adams wrote in October 1765.
Nine years and many taxes later, Thomas Jefferson spotted the same conspiratorial pattern.
“Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery,” Jefferson wrote in 1774.
Americans in the 21st century could use such manly opposition to restrain their own tyrannical government.
