10 News Conference Wingmen, Episode 12 (Taxes and Wealth)

I’ll admit that I felt as if I was struggling through much of this week’s NBC 10 Wingmen segment, which was a fairly broad-ranging conversation beginning with tax rates in communities of different wealth.

Click here if video does not appear above.

The reason for my difficulty was that the conversation was about specific policies and their immediate consequences in an area in which Bob Plain and I have fundamental differences of principle and assumptions.  Until you get down to the areas of real disagreement (which is difficult to do in under ten minutes of filmed-live television), you wind up with the talking-head syndrome, wherein two people simply assert their arguments at each other.

Stepping back, it seems to me that most of Bob’s arguments served my point.  He said, for instance, that people in the suburbs can afford to lose a larger percentage of their pay (from taxes and economic stagnation) than poor people can.

The quick response is that they’ve often committed themselves to larger costs. I’m sure progressives would say “cry me a river” over the complaint that a middle class mortgage costs more than a lower-end rental (especially if the latter is subsidized).  Be moral superiority what it may, however, the suburban family can’t immediately liquidate its property to absorb an economic hit.

Which gets to the more important point. They won’t, or they won’t want to.  Progressives like Bob can declare all they want that suburbanites are being selfish to react to public policy in their own self interest, but those who’ve striven to provide some level of comfort and security for their children are not likely to care what progressives declare about them.

Apply that conclusion to another of Bob’s statements: that it takes money to move out of a state that isn’t serving your interests.  It’s actually quite an investment of time, money, and disruption.  However, if people are having to uproot themselves, anyway, in order to absorb the economic hurt that progressives concluded they could bear, one wouldn’t be surprised to see them decide against resettling within the reach of the government that caused them that disruption.

The effort of activists to determine what sort of lifestyle their neighbors should be permitted to enjoy spirals into, well, the Rhode Island economy — distorting incentives at all income levels and undermining the very behaviors that pull people and their communities out of poverty.  Those who can, whether the wealthy or (as I call them) the striving productive, have incentive to leave, in order to preserve or to accumulate the wealth that they think they need.  Those at the other end of the spectrum, being subsidized through multiple channels, have less incentive to enter the striving category, because there is less to gain, incrementally, through hard work and delayed gratification.

And those who strive, despite it all, bear the greatest brunt, because they cannot so easily restructure their lives to escape the take, forcing them to work even harder, and making the risk of their failure even greater.

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