Tax the rich — but who’s ‘rich’?

Re “How higher taxes will make the rich happier,” Opinion, June 9

Economist Robert H. Frank is correct. There will be little sympathy for the person who, because of higher taxes, must trade in his Ferrari for a Porsche.

But what about the person who loses his house or has his deserving child denied an elite private college? Should a person making $300,000 a year be in the same tax bracket as one making $10 million? The super wealthy will not like paying more, but at the end of the day they will fly off in their private jets with no discernible impact on their lives.

We certainly need increased spending on infrastructure, but we need to carefully consider how we pay for it. Deciding whom to tax and how much has always been the critical question. Michael Gitter Pacific Palisades

Frank’s essay is both emotionally counterintuitive and empirically compelling. Wealth, he reminds us, is not a nominal amount of money but rather a differential of money that can be achieved at any level.

But he also challenges our assumptions about merit. The conceit of people with means imbedded in the familiar refrain, “I’ve earned this,” belies the reality of the human capital, good fortune and gargantuan public investment into the means of their success. It ignores the costs of sustaining civil society incurred by all of us.

A healthy capitalist economy can afford neither a completely dependent impoverished class nor a class of super-rich people escaping their proportional contributions to the maintenance of the social contract. Our willful ignorance of how we have benefited from the system — encouraged by market ideologues — has fostered rationalizations leading to our egregious inequalities of wealth.

It is both bad ethics and bad economic policy to continue this way. David DiLeo San Clemente