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Vengeance is Ours?

A recent Gallup poll shows all too clearly that the masses are ready to rise in revolt against the very rich. The tool used to measure the barely concealed hostility about the growing income disparity is to weigh the growing popularity of the progressive tax, where higher earners are required to pay a higher rate of tax. Of the @60,000 studied in 54 nations, the conclusion was all too clear. According to Virginia psychologist Shigehiro Oishi, who conducted the study, “The more progressive the tax policy is, the happier the citizens are.”

Couldn’t be much clearer than that, but is the progressive tax fair? By its nature, the tax applies a gradated, incremental increase in percentage owed based on earnings and holdings, so higher earners are “sentenced” to a progressively higher tax rate.

“If the goal of societies is to make citizens happy, tax policy matters,” says  Oishi of the study results. And apparently, the progressive tax concept makes citizens around the globe very happy indeed. Most, in fact, would gladly escape true democracy just long enough to make the rich suffer for crimes past and present.

Great for the little guy; not so great perhaps for a truly capitalist democracy. Since we are a republic more than we are democracy, should the tax code manage to be completely rewritten over a period of hundreds of years, our great grandchildren could legally wreak vengeance on a government policy that screwed their forebears out of their rightful fortunes since the earliest years of our nation. It is our right to do so, of course, but is it the correct moral solution to income disparity?

“The data is kind of weird,” Oishi admits, although it may be that our disgruntlement with the rich has been simmering for a long, long time, indeed since the days of feudalism. And some would argue we’ve yet to emerge from feudalism, but that is beyond the scope of the present discussion.

So where did the income disparity come from in the first place, and is the public yearning for vengeance misplaced?

If the “little people” are hankering after the comeuppance of the rich through a revised tax policy, it would seem natural that the flat tax is the ideal mechanism which might serve as the ideal neutral step along the way toward a more progressive tax structure. Who can really hate a flat tax, where everyone pays the same percentage rate on their income from earnings and investments income each year?

If America was truly founded on democratic ideals, the flat tax would already be the law of the land; it would have been inked into the Constitution. As it is, our founding fathers chose to leave things such as taxes and civil rights (and democracy in general) quite vague, and they did so on purpose. As we all know, they were rich, and they owned slaves.

We would never think of closing all the loopholes created by the founders in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It would be impossible to put up with the bureaucratic machinations required to transform the country from a republic into a bona fide democracy. But let us not forget who the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were written for. They were written for rich white people, not for the likes of you and me.

With that in mind, the Gallup study comes more sharply into focus.