On Fairness

Regular readers should know by now that FLG abhors the word fair. Well, then what to make of this?

Jamelle writes:

The House proposal for an income surtax - targeted at households with incomes in excess of $350,000 – would have raised $544 billion over ten years, or almost two-thirds the cost of President Obama’s plan for health care reform. What’s more, it’s not as if this would have be particularly unfair. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently noted, the top one percent of income earners captured more than 60 percent of the nation’s income gains between 2002 and 2007.

Seeing as how it’s very unlikely that the top 1 percent were the sole drivers of national income gains from 2002 to 2007, raising taxes on those earners to pay for expanded public services seems like a perfectly reasonable idea, as far as public policy goes.

First, a minor nit-pik. Getting less than 100% of the economic gains, in this case more than 60%, means, pretty much by definition, that the top 1% was not considered the sole driver of anything by the market because 40% went elsewhere. So, that's sophistry or sloppy use of language.

Second, if we are going to talk about fairness in light of 60% of the gains going to the top 1%, then the relevant question is "What percentage in the growth of tax revenue came from the top 1%?" If it's approximately 60%, then they would seem to have already seen a fair tax rise and consequently a surtax would be prima facie unfair.

FLG has no idea what the statistic is. Yet, Jamelle's logic seems to be that rich people made a lot more money than the rest of us. That's unfair. Therefore, to rectify this situation we should tax them more. All of this without any regard to what percentage of taxes they already pay.

Truth be told, Jamelle could be entirely correct. Perhaps the top 1% accounted for only 25% of the tax revenue growth during the above years. (FLG was unable to find any statistics on that, only that the top 1% pay over 40% of the total revenue. That's not the relevant statistic though.) But his argument demonstrates exactly why FLG hates the word fair. When Jamelle writes, "it’s not as if this would have be particularly unfair" he really means that "it’s not as if raising taxes on rich people would particularly upset me."

Far, far better to talk about justice, but unfortunately too many people, especially on the left, can't distinguish between fairness and justice. In fact, Rawls central assertion is that fairness is justice, and you can begin to see how FLG hates Rawls. But we'll leave that to another day.

PS. I've been picking on Jamelle too much lately. I'll leave his posts alone for a while.