This piece by Charles Wheelan, by the economics editor of Yahoo Finance, is provocatively titled “Taxes Can Be Good for You.” So we read and read to find out precisely how it is the case that having some of our earnings and property taken from us by force can actually be good for us as individuals. In the course of his argument he makes silly comments like: “A nation with zero taxes would look something like Haiti, or Baghdad just after the U.S. invasion.”
Come again? It took one click to find that Haiti is not a great place to do business: it has a corporate income tax of 15-35%, SocSec tax of 6%, a property tax of 15%, a payroll tax of 2%, a cap gains tax of 10%, a VAT of 10% a transfer tax of 3%, and a insurance mandate of 3%, for a total tax of gross profits of 31%. One more click shows that individual income tax rates are 30% over $19,000. The Index of Econ Freedom says: “Property is not secure in Haiti.”
Of course it turns out—and you have to get to the end to discover this—that what he really means is that forcing you not to do things that you want to do is good for society. Examples: you should drive a smaller car, drive less, and live in smaller houses because your current spending priorities do not match his view of social and economic priorities. So I’m sorry to report that the piece doesn’t live up to its billing. His thesis is that what is good for you is not necessarily what is good for all, which is why the government needs to step in and force you to do what he regards as the right thing (I’m making his argument for him more elaborately and explicitly than he makes it himself). Perhaps his article should be called “A Tax Plan That is Bad for You, But Good for My Political Agenda.”
