When I was a kid, I frequently heard the phrase, “Don’t tax you and don’t tax me. Tax the fellow behind the tree.” I asked what that meant and was told that the best tax is one that people don’t understand and pay while believing they are equally sharing a community responsibility. Unsaid was that it means tax the less educated and financially enabled, who haven’t the education or the means to understand the conveniently convoluted laws (“Filing Taxes Could Be Free and Simple. But H&R Block and Intuit Are Still Lobbying Against It,” Propublica, March 20, 2017).
We, the public, are not one community. We, the public, are many communities with overlapping and conflicting interests, some of which we, as individuals, share with others.
If each dollar spent is a vote cast, how many votes does each member of the upper 0.01 percent or the upper 1 percent cast versus the number cast by you? We are the 99.9 percent targeted by the misinformation campaigns to influence public opinion, but are we equally well-informed, professionally represented and organized? Which community suffers the highest casualty rates (another tax) in war? And, which profits least by inflation?
In the name of income equality, how many votes do you cast versus the number of votes cast by, the disenfranchised for equal opportunity?
