Last week, Laura Ingraham talked on her show about how the wealthy pay more taxes than any other taxpayers, both as a percentage of their income and as a percentage of the federal government’s tax revenue. Also last week, during a Senate debate over the Buffett Rule (which failed in a vote soon after), Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA) emphasized a similar point, showing the progressivity of America’s tax code is greater than that of every other nation in the industrialized world. Despite this very simple fact, Toomey noted, we are told Americans must pay more taxes.
Toomey is right – this is absolutely ridiculous. We are not undertaxed; we are merely spending far too much. In fact, according to two separate Reason pieces, J.D. Tuccille and Veronique de Rugy show, respectively, that Americans have a higher tax compliance rate than that of France, Germany, Switzerland, and every other European nation – and our system is more complicated and inefficiently written than those of Europe’s countries. Which means that despite conservative claims that we are heading in the direction of high-tax Europe…in many ways we are already there.
America can’t take much more of this. Imbalanced taxation; immoral tax loopholes and credits; special-interest subsidies; and fraudulent and wasteful spending that make U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) junkets, Secret Service prostitution visits, and Solyndra look like pocket change expenditures. Yet here in D.C. much of our “leadership” maintains that we need higher taxes instead of slashing spending and making the tax code more equitable and more economically efficient. To take from Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) last week in talking about the failure of the Senate to pass a budget, should the American people really be sending more money to fund such a corrupt and dysfunctional system?
About Dustin Siggins
