Taxes Unfair to Rich? Bullshit.

I read something in the Seattle Times yesterday that made me almost convulsive with anger. Bush's team over at the Treasury Department are looking into ways of pushing the tax burden from the saintly richest 5% to the shifty 95%. They reasoned that the rich bear a much heavier burden than the middle class and the working poor--especially considering that Social Security payroll taxes are not taxes at all, but rather savings that will be returned to the taxpayer in his or her old age. They want a flat tax rate for everyone to pay their fair share. They even had the gall in this story to say that the working poor would gladly pay more money in taxes if the tax system was simplified. The people quoted in the story also suggested that a National Sales Tax could be employed to reduce the burden.

Here are just a few things wrong with their picture:

1. The payroll tax system is one of the most regressive in our country. The taxes are only taken out of the first 100k or so of one's annual wages. So, since my salary is well under the ceiling for this tax, I and other working folk pay something in the neighborhood of 12% of our annual salary into payroll tax, while a CEO who makes $2 million a year only pays .6% of his annual salary to the tax.
2. Social Security has never been a savings account. The money I'm paying into the system now is actually spent on benefits for retirees and what's left over is being "borrowed" from to plug holes in our revived federal budget deficit. That tax ceiling was put in because some felt it unfair for the rich to pay into a system that they would get unequal benefit from. So? Wealth is redistributed by this and other goverments as a matter of course, and before them tribes and villages did the same. I don't mind paying my full share into someone else's retirement, even if it turns out that I won't need the benefits when I reach that age. Why shouldn't the rich do it, too?
3. A flat tax, as envisioned by most Republicans, would not be a fair system, but it could be if there was a floor. Our current graduated tax system is really aimed at approximating and taxing people's discretionary incomes--a flat tax won't necessarily do this uless there is a floor. Let's take two single mothers, each with two children. One happily makes $100k per year and the other lives well below the poverty line at $10k per year. The 10% flat tax takes a whopping 10k out of the former's wage, but I'm sure she'll manage with $90k left. The latter has a meager 1k removed from her income. Whereas the former might have to do with public school or a shortened vacation, the latter will have to make more drastic choices in food, clothes, or rent. If the poverty line was the floor, though, she wouldn't have to pay any tax at all.