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Monday, April 23, 2007
Taxes and the American Dream
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
While I’ve successfully avoided the label “ultra-rich,” the number of those who are rose sharply last year, according to data gathered by the Chicago consulting company Spectrem Group. For the first time, the number of U.S. households with a net worth of more than $5 million, excluding the primary home, exceeded a million in 2006. That’s up 23 percent in one year. A decade earlier, only 250,000 households fell into that category.
Drive through some intown Atlanta neighborhoods and through the mini-estate communities in prosperous areas outside I-285 and you get a sense that the nation’s wealth is more broadly shared than the class-warfare warriors would have us believe. A lot of folks are living high in the 28-county Metro Atlanta region.
Sunday was the first day in 2007 that Georgians are actually working for themselves and not to pay federal, state and local taxes, according to Tax Foundation calculations. That’s 112 days into 2007.
Who really pays? In the ongoing examination of Internal Revenue Service data by the Washington-based Tax Foundation and by the National Taxpayers Union suggests that those enjoy a decent living pay their fair share — and far more. What’s interesting, though, are the numbers of Americans who have no tax liability. Roughly 40 pecent of the U.S. population falls outside the federal income tax system, the Tax Foundation reports, and 60 percent get more in government spending than they pay in taxes. And it’ll get worse when baby boomers retire.
The point here is that an increasing number of Americans don’t care about tax cuts or the size of the federal governent. A permanent soak-the-rich constituency is in the making. And a permanent political class that sees wealth-transfer as the way to stay in office.
So rejoice that the American Dream lives. But just as there’s a race between government-provided universal health care and free-market alternatives, there’s a race too to define the American Dream. Is it that we earn our way to mini-estates by producing? Or that we elect politicians who will soak the producers to provide us their lifestyle?
