The left keeps complaining that the middle class is being obliterated, hinting that it’s because the superrich are “taking” too much of “the nation’s” wealth. That is pure baloney, but there is one real factor involved that hurts the middle class more than it hurts the rich — the increasing burden of taxes.
In today’s Wall Street Journal, George Mason University Law School professor Todd Zywicki (who will be among the speakers at this October’s Pope Center conference) has a splendid article in which he demonstrates that taxes have been rising much faster than other major household costs, such as mortgage payments, automobile, and health insurance. Zywicki writes, “This suggests that the most important change in the balance sheets of middle-class households over the past three decades is a dramatically higher tax burden caused by the progreswswive nature of the American tax system. In turn it follows that the most effective way of alleviating the household budget crunch would be to adopt lower and flatter tax rates that would reduce the government’s take.”
Absolutely right. But then the government would also have to reduce its profligate spending and doing that is the very last thing most politicians want to consider.
