The Economy Cries Whenever a Rich Man Is Taxed

[from 4/14/10]

It was Benjamin Franklin, the inventor of the hundred dollar bill, who said there is nothing certain in this world except death and taxes. That simplifies by noting death is just your last and deepest tax. Your tax for having taken up space and used the Earth is to be put back into it. To put it another way, it's your tax for having been personally taxing on the rest of the planet. It's only a shame it's not a progressive tax, and it's assessed on such an unfair and haphazard schedule. People who take more than their fair share should go sooner. The poor and parsimonious should at least get a proportional pass, based on use.

If death were a use tax, I figure the average poor person scraping by at the poverty level in America should get to live about twice as long as someone at the median income level, and roughly 1,000 to 10,000 times as long as a billionaire.

But not to worry, you billionaires, because I care about you and don't really want to see all of you dead by age one week. So in my perfect world, rich people could buy death abatements from poor people. Let's say you make a quarter million per year before taxes. That would be enough to buy fifty years of extended life, five each from ten different poor people, and still leave you with enough to live on. Combined with your pre-existing allotment, that would even everything out. Of course, you'd be poor, too, by then, but that would be your choice.

Alternatively, you could get credits for working to extend the lives of the poor. For example, you could give health care to people who can't afford it. Then we let you live longer, too. A win-win-win all around.

Having said all that, it will probably surprise some of you that I'm all for the current WA State Legislature's plan to tax the bejeezus out of stuff poor people like, like candy, beer, soda pop, cigarettes, fuzzy dice, microwave burritos, scratch tickets, and paintings on velvet. (I'm not sure about all of those, not having read the proposal.)

I'm thinking how much worse the alternative would be. We all know that the only alternative to making poor people more miserable than they already are, is to make rich people give the state some of their money. We can't do that because to make rich people give the state any money would hurt the economy.

In fact, it hurts the economy so much when rich people have to give up any of their money, we shouldn't tax rich people financially at all. No income taxes, no estate taxes, not even sales taxes. If you can prove you're rich, you should even be exempt from sales and property taxes, because taxing the rich hurts the economy, and that hurts everybody.

Just think of what a great country this would be if only poor people were taxed. The economy would never be hurt. What a happy economy that would be!

Conversely, if we continue to tax the rich as we do, I'm afraid the day will come when we won't have any rich people. Then you'll all be sorry. You'd have no one to pay you to bus their tables at restaurants you couldn't afford yourself anymore. You'd have no one to pay you to clean their toilets after exploding them. What will you do, work at a candy manufacturing company?

Without rich people, who would buy all the high end merchandise that is priced forever out of your reach? No one, so that merchandise would stop being made and marketed, and you wouldn't ever be able to not buy it again. We're not just talking mansions and yachts here, we're talking Lamborghinis, Lear Jets, and major league teams. You and your neighbors would have to put on your own ball games and risk driving to them in Hondas, or take the bus. The horror.