As the expiration of Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy approaches a suggestion for Obama in changing the conversation
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Would it further compromise the strength of a weak economy to let the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest expire? That is exactly what we are hearing from Republicans and from a few conservative Democrats as the January 1 date for expiration draws closer. Taking the misleading line that the long-awaited expiration of the partial tax holiday enjoyed by the top 2% of households amounts to an intolerable new tax hike, Utah's Sen. Orrin Hatch lashes out at expiration as a "job killer." Already the handicappers are giving odds on how much the White House will end up conceding to the braying anti-tax forces.
This looming fight offers a tremendous teachable moment for public ethics if President Obama would only seize it and lead us into a national conversation on the subject of wealth and taxes. Such a conversation could be filled with implicit theological content, inasmuch as what I like to call "good religion" has a big stake moderating extreme wealth for the sake of commonwealth principles.
Certainly there is no shortage of bad religion--and bad history--hovering around the no tax or low tax mentality. When Chief Justice John Marshall described the power to tax as "the power to destroy" in 1819 he was actually quoting Daniel Webster and upholding federal supremacy against states that were then attempting to tax the Bank of the United States out of existence.
But anti-tax conservatives blithely ignore the historical context and still recite the Marshall mantra as they go to bed. They raise their children up to think of all taxation as a vicious incubus. Thanks to the oracles of conservative demigods like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, their anti-tax credo can even claim to be grounded in a kind of sacred scripture. Above all, they love to cling to that delicious phrase, "the power to destroy."
But what if the power to tax were viewed instead as the power to create? What if it were viewed as an tremendous power for good in a culture in which the poor and relatively powerless have mostly been abandoned (and in which the wealthiest increasingly absent themselves from any kind of conversation about national priorities, in part because they no longer have to foot the bill)?
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