As the occupiers have crowed about the 1 percent and 99 percent, some of their critics have focused on two other percentages: the 53 percent of Americans who pay federal income tax and the 47 percent who don’t.
Ramesh Ponnuru‘s latest National Review Online column suggests this fixation on the percentage of people who pay federal income taxes is not particularly helpful.
In one respect, the fixation on the number of people paying income tax is absurdly optimistic. Conservatives who worry about the political implications of this number are assuming that people who pay no income tax will conclude that expansions of government serve their material interests and vote accordingly. But if that’s the case, then surely anyone who pays some income taxes, but gets more in benefits from the federal government, should reach the same conclusion. The real “takers” coalition would then include anyone who is a net beneficiary of the federal government. Under those circumstances merely requiring everyone to pay some amount in income taxes would change nothing. Any welfare state will have a large number of net beneficiaries. In a welfare state that runs routine, large deficits, almost everyone may be among them.
It is entirely plausible that receiving benefits from the government biases some beneficiaries against needed reforms, and that the problem grows more acute the more beneficiaries there are. Surely this is the real cause for concern: Conservatives cannot really believe that it was a flaw in America’s founding that nobody paid income taxes to the federal government for almost all of the country’s history before the welfare state.
But conservatives should seek to remedy the problem by cutting benefits rather than by raising taxes in the hope it will make people more eager to cut benefits. To seek to raise taxes on poor and middle-class people would be a terrible mistake. The idea is bound to be unpopular. And it would alter the character of conservatism for the worse. A desire to cut taxes for people at all income levels, and to oppose tax increases at all income levels, was key to associating conservatism with the diffusion of opportunity in the Reagan years and after. Changed circumstances may demand a different approach than that of three decades ago. They do not compel conservatism to become a creed openly focused on helping one group at the expense of another, a kind of mirror image of egalitarian liberalism.
