Posted by Leonard Steinberg on December 18th, 2012

 

While Washington debates what is rich in the USA (we are up to $ 400k/year now….thats rich with 2 kids in Manhattan?), without any adjustment made for cost of living for the city you live in, no-one seems to want to address the dirty truth of how disparately rich people pay taxes: I know of people who earn $ 1 million per year who pay about $ 200,000.00 per year in federal taxes…..while others earning the identical income pay double. is this constitutional?

 

The United States was born with a Declaration of Independence that proclaimed, as a self-evident truth, that, “all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men.” According to the founders of the United States of America, all people are equal, by virtue of their humanity, in possession of certain rights (such as rights to liberty) that it is the responsibility of government to protect.The founders were not claiming that all individuals are equal in their personal attributes, such as physical strength, intelligence, or artistic talent. They were not saying that a government is established to enforce equality or uniformity in the way people think, act, or live. Rather, the founders were committed to establishing a government that would guarantee equally to all individuals the rule of law and security for liberty under the law. Well, this does not appear to be the case in our tax code.

 

So maybe instead of focusing exclusively on raising the tax rates for the ‘rich’, Washington should focus on who is paying what and how. Maybe if the tax rates came down on the ‘rich’ but those that were under-paying significantly had to cease their un-constitutional ways, the net proceeds would rise as significanlty as an arbitrary tax hike?

 

To those who care so passionately about our Constitutional right to bear arms, amongst other rights, maybe that passion should be equally applied to our rights to equality in the tax code.