The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Lesson in the common good at the barbecue
At a recent beachside family barbecue, I had a dispute with my son. Things started off innocuously when I noted to our guests that I had turned a tidy profit upon selling a Manhattan condominium. Congratulating myself on my wise investment, I further noted that since it had been our primary residence, we didn’t have to pay taxes on our capital gain.
My son scoffed. “Good for you,” he said, “but bad for the rest of us. The last thing this country needs is more unaffordable housing.”
He added, “And then tax avoidance on top of it. Your profit certainly benefits you, but it hardly serves the common good.”
I patiently responded that as Americans, one of our first duties is to pay as little as possible in taxes. “President Trump made an art of avoiding taxes,” I pointed out, “and even bragged about it.” I quoted our former president: “That [not paying taxes] makes me smart.”
To his other point, I said, increasing the stock of affordable housing requires interfering in the housing market. Instead of manipulating the free market, we should let the housing market, just like other markets, operate freely in order to maximize wealth generation. “After all,” I noted, “a rising tide lifts all boats.”
He snorted, “You mean, a rising tide lifts all yachts. What about those too poor to own a boat, who are swamped by rising inequality?”
I answered, “The government should encourage increased wealth generation, and if that means more rich people, so be it. Creating more multimillionaires and billionaires results in more investment and job creation,” I pointed out. “That benefits everyone.”
“Ah, the old ‘trickle-down’ theory of wealth generation,” he said. “Let’s see how that’s working out.” He said that 87 percent of the increase in wealth in the United States between 2006 and 2018 went to the richest 10 percent, while the bottom 50 percent actually lost wealth in that period.
I recognized his ploy of relying on facts to confuse the issue. So I tried to refocus on taxes. “‘Tax the rich’ is an easy slogan,” I said. “But what it really means is class warfare. You bleeding-heart liberals are just trying to set the poor against the rich.”
“It’s time to admit we are already in a class war,” he answered, “and the rich are winning.” The top 1 percent in the United States own about 40 percent of the nation’s wealth, he said, while the bottom 90 percent now own less than 25 percent.
“And it’s not just a war against the poor,” he went on. “The middle class is also under attack.” From 1970 to 2018, he said, upper-income families increased their wealth by 64 percent, but middle-class families by only 49 percent, and lower-income families by 43 percent. Over this period, the wealthy increased their share of the nation’s aggregate income from 29 percent to 48 percent, and the share of the middle class decreased from 62 percent to 43 percent.
I could tell he was grasping at straws by relying on statistics. So I tried to redirect our discussion to the need to lower taxes and asked, “So, you want the rich to pay higher taxes?” He answered in the affirmative, arguing that taxes on the top one-tenth of one percent had decreased by more than 83 percent between 1953 and 2018. “Well, what do you suggest?” I asked. “A wealth tax, like your leftist Democratic comrades are pushing?”
He responded that the working and middle classes already pay a wealth tax. The assets of many working- and middle-class families consist primarily of the equity in their homes. They pay a wealth tax on their homes to fund municipal services — and not just on their equity in their homes, but on the assessed value. The poor living paycheck to paycheck pay a wealth tax on their cars. Meanwhile multimillionaires and billionaires escape taxation on almost the entirety of their assets.
Seeing that he was trying to shift the discussion to fairness, I tried to get back on track about affordable housing. “So you think people have a right to decent, affordable housing,” I said. “What’s next? A right to health care?”
Again he tried to obfuscate the issue with facts. He was not satisfied with Obamacare because more than 2 million Americans remain uncovered. He said that health care as a basic human right was recognized not only by the World Health Organization in 2017, but even by the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights as far back as 1948.
By this time I realized that there was no point in reasoning with him. Regulating the free enterprise system? Increasing taxes? Human rights? The United Nations? We seem to have raised an unrepentant socialist!
I blame his mother. Growing up, he’d sometimes get into a dispute with a playmate over toys. I’d try to resolve the matter by asking, “Who’s is it?” But she unfortunately insisted on teaching him to share. And now look where that’s gotten us — years later he’s blathering about social justice and the common good!
So I tried to calm myself. I imagined him in a few more years, once he has joined the upper middle class, accumulated his own wealth including a suburban home, and begun to track his stock holdings. Then he will understand that taxes should be lowered, not increased, that we need less, not more, government regulation, and that he should properly be concerned with his own private good, not some nebulous “common good.”
Consoled with this thought, I sat back and opened another Corona.
By this time I realized that there was no point in reasoning with him. Regulating the free enterprise system?