Americans want tax fairness, not tax favors

By JOHN McCALLUM

Editor

Now that the annual stress-inducing ritual of income tax filing deadline has passed, how you doing? Still feeling stressed, or are you relieved it’s done?

You’re not alone if you feel worn out by the requirements of our tax system. According to an April 14 Pew Research Center report, 43 percent of Americans are bothered a lot about the complexity of our tax system, with another 29 percent bothered some.

Soon, politicians will be trumpeting “Tax Relief Day,” that mythical moment when, hypothetically, all of our money stops going to pay for government and instead starts flowing into our pockets. It’s a day ostensibly designed to show we’re paying too much in taxes for a government that’s too big.

Right now, President Donald Trump and Congress are working on plans to reduce taxes for everybody — you, me, the family living in the Habitat for Humanity home, the family living in the 50,000-square-foot mansion with six vehicles, a 90-foot yacht and private airplane, and particularly that multi-billion dollar, cash-strapped corporation down the road. The contention from Trump and others of his ilk are taxes are a burden, particularly to multi-billion dollar corporations but also to you and me.

But are they? Recent data indicates maybe not as much as the millionaires and billionaires in charge of our government think.

In her new book “Read My Lips: Why Americans are Proud to Pay Taxes,” Brookings Institute fellow Vanessa S. Williams writes that most of us regard paying taxes as our civic duty and are offended at those who don’t do their part. An April 13 Gallup survey indicates 61 percent of Americans see their tax obligation as fair — the highest percentage since 2009 and a number that includes 69 percent of Democrats, 60 percent of Independents and 56 percent of Republicans.

In that same Pew report, 62 percent of Americans say they are bothered a lot by corporations they don’t see as paying their fair share of taxes, along with 60 percent who view wealthy people in a similar light. On the flip side, 46 percent of us aren’t bothered much or at all by the amount we pay — 26 percent are bothered some — and 57 percent aren’t bothered much or at all about poor people who don’t pay their fair share.

The specifics of these numbers are more complex, because we as a people are complex, but they are all shifts upwards from previous positions over the past several months.

One final bit of data from Brookings Institute governance fellow William A. Galston notes that of those voters who helped elect Trump, low-income Republicans, only 25 percent complain about the amount of taxes they pay, 26 percent think poor people are shirking their responsibility to fund the federal government while 51 percent and 45 percent resent corporations and wealthy people respectively who don’t pay their fair share.

Politicians, especially Republicans, would do well to look at this data and mull it over a bit. Nobody likes paying taxes, but many of us rank-and-file Americans view it as a necessary evil, the price of running our government. Indeed, data in the Pew report shows a good slice of Americans feel we are getting the right amount of services for the amount we’re paying.

Americans have an inherent feeling of what is fair, and by these statistics, many of us feel the people Trump and Congress are considering giving the largest tax breaks to — corporations — aren’t paying their fair share to help run the government from which they profit so handsomely right now.

One last piece of information I’ll give you is historical. In the 1950s and into the 1960s, when this country was the most economically prosperous, corporate tax rates were also at their highest.

There are plenty of reasons why this is different today, and one of those is the salaries of corporations’ chief executive officers — much higher now than then.

Americans know what’s fair. It’s time our tax codes reflect that.

John McCallum can be reached at [email protected].