But the only way to remedy his concern is the opposite extreme. Because no matter how hard the Mexican immigrant works he's never going to achieve anywhere near the same amount as the guy whose parents sent him to Harvard.
Again, keep in mind this guy started out by saying "I'm 20, I went to all the right schools and I didn't get a great job so life is unfair". So he's not arguing for lifting those who are profoundly disadvantaged out of poverty (which I have no problem with). He's arguing for fairness among the upper classes meaning everyone should be equal. I have no problem with making sure the kids of the Mexican immigrant can go to college but this guy's arguing for equal treatment for all and that's just not something the Government should be trying to do (because it will profoundly backfire)
* I have no problem with making sure the kids of the Mexican immigrant can go to college but this guy's arguing for equal treatment for all and that's just not something the Government should be trying to do (because it will profoundly backfire)*
As a matter of fact that's exactly what the government should do. Equal treatment at the hands of the government wherever it interferes is precisely the point of a democracy.
I'm really just being a weenie, though; I understand perfectly well that where you wrote "equal treatment" you really meant "equal results", and I agree with that point.
However, I don't think that was really the main thrust of his argument, anyways. What I got was "If you've succeeded, that's great, but stop being so damn smug about it and don't you dare try to pretend that anybody could do the same if they just worked hard enough - things could have just as easily gone the other way, and the same efforts could have left you struggling just like me."
Which has some validity, in my opinion. Hard work is merely a necessary prerequisite to financial success, it does not guarantee it (and as time goes on, things like college play less of a role since everyone does them, and there are fewer straightforward ways to shift the odds in your favor).
The very rich tend to mistakenly assume that chance played a negligible role in their ascent, which is almost never the case. Bill Gates probably never would have been poor, but absent a few lucky coincidences he could easily have ended up as a senior programmer making a middle-of-the-road wage instead of one of the world's richest men...
There are many types of “fair” and equal. One thing that makes our system unfair is the failure to communicate what happens, not just how the system actually works. (You must spend lot's of time and money to find all the available tax breaks.)
With my version of “fair” you should rework the federal tax code to be as simple as possible. Everyone get’s 700$ / month from the government, free health care and pays ~35% in taxes with zero tax breaks of any kind and no minimum wage of any kind. Donate to charity or retirement and you get no help from the government. You are still protected from starvation, but there is no unemployment insurance, social security or medicare.
The real advantage is the simple system is easy to understand and does what most “social” programs (SS, Medicare, Medicaid etc) try and do. There are also just 2 numbers to debate, the tax rate and the government subsidy.
PS: A true tax code would need to be longer than that, but the goal would be something that could be printed legibly on a single sheet of paper and understood by most people with an 8th grade education.
With my version of “fair” you should rework the federal tax code to be as simple as possible. (snipped)
And you've hit the crux of the problem. Everyone has their own version of "fair". There's a whole spectrum, even if we just restrict it to taxation:
(Note well that I don't claim most of these justifications are reasonable, only that a case could be made)
- Poor people have proven that they don't effectively use their money; rich people have proven that they do. So we shouldn't tax the rich at all, because an optimal allocation of resources would dictate that they should be concentrated where they are most effectively used.
- The poor tend to use more government money than the rich, so the poor should pay higher taxes in dollar amount than the rich do.
- Everyone has the right to consume roughly the same amount of government resources, regardless of what they actually use, so "fair" means to charge everyone for their share, i.e. everyone should be taxed the same dollar amount.
- Poor people shouldn't pay as much dollar-wise as the rich, because that's a bit cruel, but they do consume more "free money" from the government, so should pay proportionally more than the rich; to be "fair" we should tax poor people a percentage that is a bit more than the rich.
- "Fair" can only mean that we take a given percentage of everyone's income, and that this percentage is the same for everybody.
- "Fair" should mean that everybody hurts the same, and it hurts a lot more to lose 10% of $1000 than it hurts to lose 10% of $1 million. So we should have an income dependent rate that goes slightly up the more money you make.
- The last entry is right, but income doesn't effectively estimate how much a tax hurts, because the real pain you feel from tax is that relative to your total wealth. Rich people tend to have far more non-income wealth than poor people, so since we can't really measure wealth, we need to tax their income even more aggressively.
- Fuck Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and the Google guys, they have more money than God anyways, let's just tax the living crap out of the top 5% progressively (i.e. a billionaire still pays more tax than a millionaire) and leave everyone else alone. There's still a small incentive to make more money, and most companies don't grow based on the personal greed of their most wealthy members anyhow, so our economy will still do just fine, thank you.
Unsurprisingly, people's beliefs about fair taxation tend to correlate fairly strongly to where they lie along the income curve. But the point is, there are a lot of different ways to evaluate "fair" in this context, and "flat" is not necessarily the best answer.
FWIW, if you look at tax rate relative to total wealth, the curve is fairly flat, and it turns out that the middle class actually makes out the best - both the poor and the rich get just about equally screwed.
Which is precisely what the tax burden distribution should look like in a democracy, since the majority of people reside in the middle of the Bell curve and apply downward pressure on the wealth-adjusted tax rate there. The only surprise is that the highest 0.01% doesn't get hit harder than they do, since so much of the wealth is there; that's an indication that our democracy is not person-weighted, but at least partially dollar-weighted.
My point is complexity is often used to hide people being fucked over. An example of this is the US tax code.
If you include SS, Medicare, and Tax breaks a single person in the middle class is totally fucked over by the tax code. Warren buffet has even said his secretary pays a higher tax rate than he does. But, by hiding specific truths you can make it look like the tax code says just about anything you want.
PS: I think most people would look at my suggestion and think, they would get a worse deal, which says more about how little they understand the tax code than it does about what's actually happening. Lot's of people would be worse off, but plenty of people who think they would be worse off, would actually come out ahead.
Edit: Back to his original essays, devoting a lot of time and money to an ivy league education is risky. So, is starting a company. The average ROI might be good, but the worse case is horrible. Ignoring outliers is disingenuous, because not all people find themselves on the happy path to heath and wealth. And it's hard to separate drive and intelligence from luck.
No. Just because one extreme position is wrong it does not follow that the opposite extreme position is right.