I understand the tax debate in this country, I really do. Obviously there are a lot of greedy people who just want more money, but the more intelligent flat taxers have a fair argument to make. I don't entirely agree, but I'm not dogmatic on what sort of revenue raising system we use, and I'm not dogmatic on what tax rates should be, so long as they cover our obligations. I'll be honest: a lot of lefties have a visceral hatred of the rich, and basically want to see them punished for something or other. I don't hate the rich, just some groups of them (Wall Street, for example, but I think pretty much everyone hates them at this point), and my support for redistributionist institutions and policies comes from my belief that egalitarian societies are superior to unequal ones, that the benefits of egalitarianism are many and widespread, and that our history tells us that times of great inequality are the times where our country is consumed by vicious culture war squabbles that keep us from fixing our real problems. The 1920s, for example, were a decade of bitter disputes over things like prohibition, women's rights, etc. Those battles subsided (and many of them ended) when FDR took office and started equalizing things. I have no quarrel with the market (though I do think government needs to define it) and I don't hate the rich, but I do feel that it's fundamentally antithetical to the concept of democracy that some people would have so much more power than others, and I don't think that the market will just organize itself into an egalitarian structure.
So that's where I'm coming from. But there is the tax debate, then there's Steele's comment. What is this? After income tax withholding (and let's just assume payroll tax withholding too, for 46.5%), a million dollars will wind up being north of $500,000, which is good enough for admittance into the mythical top one percent of wage earners. It's about ten times the average household income in the United States. Admittedly, a lot of money is withheld from that. But it's still a lot of cash! At least, it is to someone like me. And to most people who aren't GOP donors, probably.
What we're seeing here is a GOP that has lost the thread. It's gone from "Shouldn't your taxes be lower?" to "Taxes are tyranny!" over the course of the past few years. The first message is effective, because the logic is inherently appealing. The second isn't, because it only appeals to a very specific group of people. And framing things the way Steele has is probably the worst sort of way to argue his point in the middle of a recession.
