Biden is right: After decades of widening income and wealth disparities, it is time to increase public investment and ask the wealthiest to contribute more to the common good. View the discussion thread. Skip to main content. A must-read political newsletter that breaks news and catches you up on what is happening. Most Popular - Easy to read, daily digest of the news from The Hill and around the world. The Hill's must read political newsletter that breaks news and catches you up on what happened in the morning and what to look for after lunch.
Delivered to your inbox every weekday evening, our politics and policy newsletters are a daily digest of today's news and what's expected to break tomorrow. National Security. Imposing higher taxes on the rich would actually help the economy grow faster , Democrats say. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders who favor taxing the rich, hitting roughly one of every people.
Other Democrats may get the same result. Many Americans feel that the system is rigged against them. Prices for necessities such as health care, day care, education and housing are rising faster than incomes. The economy would benefit directly from a more equal distribution of income because middle- and low-income families spend a greater portion of their incomes than the very rich do, so more money would recycle through the economy.
The economy would also benefit if everyone could take advantage of the opportunities that are presently hoarded by the rich. How many great leaders, thinkers and inventors never got the chance? Social class, wealth and political power are inherited from our parents and grandparents to a shocking degree. Inequality of wealth creates other problems. The federal government — which might invest more to fight climate change, to build infrastructure and to restructure health care, day care and education to make them more affordable — is also starved for resources.
There are many objections to taxes that target the rich. Read this comprehensive debunking by law professors Lily Batchelder and David Kamin. Most fundamentally, some people say, taxes on wealth would destroy capitalism, or at least slow the growth rate. A wealth tax would reduce incentives for entrepreneurs and thus kill innovation and technological progress, they argue. Envy necessarily involves a desire to dispossess the other person of that envied item, regardless of whether you get to possess it yourself.
The editors of The Wall Street Journal may have had this element of envy in mind when they attached the label to Biden and his capital gains proposal. If so, then that would truly be envy. Disloyal woman looking another man and her angry boyfriend looking at her on the street.
As a corollary of sorts, philosophers have been generally insistent that true envy is never motivated by moral considerations — it is a negative, visceral emotion without meaningful justification. Philosophers acknowledge that people are sometimes bothered by the success of others for genuinely moral reasons. They may, for instance, believe that the distribution of possessions is unjust.
True envy makes no room for moral thoughts or goals, just visceral responses. Indeed, envy has been used to discredit egalitarianism, with critics arguing that egalitarian notions of fairness are actually rooted in envy. That is, egalitarians are driven by an amoral, envious response to the wealth of others. In practice, however, it can be hard to sustain this attack on egalitarianism. What do we take from all this philosophizing?
A better, more rigorous definition of envy, I think. If we want to take envy seriously as a charge against progressive taxation, then we need a reasonable definition of what envy might actually entail. Distress and destruction: These are the crucial elements of envy. Using this more rigorous definition, envy appears to be a rather poor explanation for most progressive tax reforms. To be sure, such taxes are often driven by a sense of distress at rising inequality — at the wealth of others, in other words.
And they are often designed to limit or even destroy the wealth that makes that inequality possible. It fails especially when that funding is targeted toward alleviating poverty. When a political coalition that extends well into the middle and even upper classes champions a tax program that takes from the rich and gives to the poor, can that really be described as envy? Can you truly be envious on behalf of someone else?
Especially when your own wealth might be a target of those taxes? The issue here is motivation. Any reasonably precise definition of envy must treat it as a negative, visceral emotion, not one rooted in moral considerations. When a tax is designed to advance a set of moral imperatives, then it really cannot be described as an envy tax: The point of the levy is to solve a problem, not simply to inflict pain.
Lindsey might grant this point but still insist that a tax designed with a rate that exceeds the revenue-maximizing rate must still be rooted in envy: If raising money to help the poor were the real motive, then raising the maximum amount of money would be desirable. Sacrificing revenue for the sake of a non-maximizing rate can be explained only by spite.
However, there are other reasons why lawmakers and the voting coalitions that elect them might care about factors other than revenue maximization.
True democracy, in their view, required limits on economic as well as political power, because the former often led directly to the latter. In evaluating the envy charge, they simply have to believe that they are right. The crucial element of envy, in other words, lies in the realm of motive. If envy is going to mean anything useful, it has to mean something indefensible.
It may still be a bad tax — unwise, unaffordable, even deeply unfair. The philosophers may be excessively picky about how they define their terms, but they are right to insist on this element in the definition of envy. Without it, envy is reduced to something much less damning.
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