Taxation is terrorism

Yes, it was only a matter of time before a Vast Rightwing Conspiracy version of Proudhon's dictum worked its way into the mainstream, and so it is with the Wall Street Journal Online's James Taranto on Tuesday. The context is Dubya's Social Security reform "plan" and one option up for grabs to generate additional funds for the program is to raise the cap at which Social Security taxes are paid. (Our Irish readership should think of PRSI, which has a very similar structure.) Taranto explains by way of criticising one such proposal:

The Social Securty [sic] tax is a levy of 12.4% of income up to (currently) $90,000. It is designed this way for a reason: to create the illusion that the taxpayer is getting a benefit for his money rather than being on a losing end of an income transfer. This, however, offends [Washington Post columnist Richard] Cohen's sense of fairness, and here's his solution:

[Cohen] Whatever the merits of personal investment accounts, they would do nothing to alter the dismal math of Social Security projections. But raising the cap would. Why $90,000? Why not $140,000? Better yet, why not raise it to $140,000 and then raise it to confiscatory levels on obscene payments such as Michael Eisner's $575.6 million back in 1998 ... [end excerpt]

Raising the cap to $140,000 would amount to an increase in marginal rates of roughly 40% to 45% for taxpayers whose incomes are in the low six figures--a huge tax increase targeted at the most productive Americans. The logic here is similar to that of suicide bombing: It's worth making a big sacrifice for the sake of making the enemy suffer even more. Somehow, though, we doubt most Americans view Michael Eisner as the enemy.

It would be tough to find a better example of the debased and deranged rhetoric that now has currency on the right: they can't even spell the program's name correctly; we've stared at that "illusion" sentence for 5 times and still can't figure out what it's supposed to mean, and the logic of Cohen's utterly unremarkable proposal is not to go all Hamas on the rich, but to raise more money for the program.

In fact, all that removing the cap does is move the Social Security Tax to a flat tax -- all incomes pay the same percentage rate. Isn't the Wall Street Journal supposed to love the flat tax? And by their free market philosophy, "the most productive Americans" aren't those poor dears in the low 6 figures. It's people like Michael Eisner, who is already being suicide-bombed by the rest of the nation's income tax system. And who is the shadowy leader of this homicide-bomber lift-the-tax-cap movement? George W. Bush. The snake begins to consume itself.