Stu Bykofsky: Taxes? We need stinking taxes
TA-DA! TODAY is Tax Day, the deadline for submitting your boring 1040, happily seeking a refund or grudgingly sending your cash into the U.S. Treasury.
TA-DA! TODAY is Tax Day, the deadline for submitting your boring 1040, happily seeking a refund or grudgingly sending your cash into the U.S. Treasury.
You may not like hearing this, but your personal federal income tax is too low. Mine, too, even though the check I just mailed in could have financed a month's vacation on the Italian Riviera.
The Daily News/Inquirer Building is 18 stories high and I feel like I have just jumped off it. If I haven't, some tea-party friends will be happy to give me a friendly, brotherly shove.
But before anyone commits columnicide, let me have my last words, globally and individually.
The U.S. top tax bracket of 35 percent is low compared with other industrialized nations' (2005 figures): Denmark, 59 percent; Netherlands, 52; Australia, 45; France, 50; Germany, 45; Italy, 43; Japan, 40. They pay additional local taxes, and so do we.
But who cares about them foreigners anyway?
This is America; we do things our own way. That's why they use metric and we use the um, er, whatchamacallit system.
So let's go local for a historical look at top U.S. income-tax rates.
Do you know, or do you remember, the top rate was 91 percent during the Eisenhower years? Yes - 91 percent! Is that ancient history?
Ronald Reagan is not and when he took office in 1981, he cut the top rate - which was in the 70s - to 50 percent, 15 points higher than today.
Am I being, like, a total Marxist tool to suggest we would survive if we returned the top rate to what it was under Saint Ronald?
Any hike would not affect the 47 percent of American households' paying no income tax at all. (They may be paying local and state taxes and Social Security.) Half of us are pulling the wagon while half of us are riding in it. To turn a Revolutionary phrase around, is that representation without taxation?
Is that democratic? Is that smart? With no skin in the game, the 47 percent can ask for the moon because when the debt piles up higher than Everest, they won't have to pay for it.
Before the leftist/progressive/ humanitarians go bonkers, I wouldn't add a tax burden to the poverty-stricken or working poor. My tax lasso would snare those at the heavy end of the scale, Americans "earning" so much money they couldn't spend it all if they had the longevity of a tortoise.
I use "earning" in quotes because I don't consider millions derived from swapping "derivatives" back and forth to be "earned," not the way a steamfitter or a nurse really earns money.
Before the right/reactionary/budget bears go bonkers, while a 50 percent top tax rate seems high (but it's the Reagan Rate), it will help clear our debts. A Quinnipiac Poll last month said 72 percent of Americans - including 56 percent of Republicans - think those making more than $1 million should pay more than they do.
I respect tea-party ideals, but their goals are contradictory: Lower taxes and debt reduction.
We need higher taxes to help reduce the debt, but taxes alone won't pull us from the financial quicksand. Government spending and entitlements have to be cut. What that looks like is going on right now in New Jersey. It ain't pretty.
The U.S. is staring at trillions of future debt. The way Americans have almost always operated is for one generation to leave a richer, stronger country for our heirs. How dare we transfer crushing debt to our children and grandchildren?
To answer the question that is floating in some minds, I am in the 25 percent bracket and, yes, I can stand a modest tax increase.
The responsible thing is for us to clean up the mess we have made. If that means higher taxes, and fewer government gum drops, it sometimes takes bitter medicine to get us back to health.
E-mail stubyko@phillynews.com or call 215-854-5977. For recent columns: