Regressive-tax cutters distort reality and impede progress: They are bad leftists.

New York is a refuge of liberal thought. It is a benefit of living here to be surrounded by others that believe in gay rights, equal protection under the law, and working towards elusive racial harmony. In an informal alliance with the west coast, liberals have lead the country socially by leading it culturally in television, movies, and editorial pages. We hope you like your safe, legal, and rare interracial marriage, Alabama.

But economically we’re as backward as anywhere. Sure, we pay more in taxes here and have a few more public services, but our state’s income tax brackets are more flatly graded than the federal ones. The highest percentage anyone pays is less than double the lowest, whereas the highest federal bracket levies a rate three and a half times the lowest. Taken together, New York makes its citizens’ income tax less progressive.

And what does progressive mean? It’s an embarrassingly loaded term, but a century of use has established a precise meaning in taxation:

increasing as a proportion of the sum taxed as that sum increases

And surprising as it might be to people making careers crudely demonizing or glorifying capitalism, the free market deity Adam Smith was an early supporter of progressive taxation:

It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more in proportion.

Tepid support, but it’s more than you’ll hear from latter day supposed free-market-loving Republicans. Speaking of.

Then a movie star messed it all up

We had a decently progressive national income tax. The cultural dominance of liberal cities was doing its job just fine, until a famous conservative actor named Ronald Reagan made mincemeat of a good man that was an inept president, giving him a mandate to try whatever the heck he wanted. And what he wanted was to shrink the federal government and lower taxes. He failed utterly in his first aim, if it was ever a serious one, and in the second his lowering amounted to making the income tax substantially less progressive.

Unfortunately for Democrats, the electorate did not know the difference. People were happy to pay lower taxes and did not perceive that the much larger breaks given to the wealthy would be damaging, somehow and somewhere, to everyone below. Following the unqualified popular success of Reagan’s cuts, states cut taxes as well, particularly during the economic boom of the Clinton years. Democrats did little to stop the tax cutting craze from trickling down to the country’s political foundations.

As as result there is not a sprout of economic leftistism to be cultivated in the American public. The line was not held on cutting taxes, staying in office was more important than principles, and the progressive spirit was replaced with empty populism. The rare attempt to raise some brackets must bear the demagogic name “millionaire’s tax,” whatever that means in terms of income. And if that’s not enough, it must include more tax cuts for everyone else. While this ruse succeeded in New Jersey, even that is failing in our scandal-ridden state government. As for honest progressive tax reform, nudging up all but the lowest rates increasingly with income, that may as well be named Voldemort.

Because restoring income taxes to their former progressive status requires—in plain English—raising taxes, and because no one in the Democratic or any party has the nerve to do it fairly, fixing the tax code is impossible. But if it can’t work towards a more progressive income tax, what’s the point of having an economic left wing?

Idle hands are of the Democrats

Rather than face the political reality that they have retreated so far as to be spectators in the distribution of wealth, failed progressives are making mischief from the sidelines. Why fight and lose for progressive income taxes when you can fight for lower taxes! Ha ha, what? No, really. Modern-day American progressives are fighting for lower taxes just like Republicans, because that is what this bankrupt country with terrible public services needs. The only difference is that progressives want to cut regressive taxes. Fortunately, this loaded term has a definition as clear as its load-bearing antithesis:

taking a proportionally greater amount from those on lower incomes

Okay, fair enough. Being regressive is indisputably bad for income taxes, even though it is exactly what the Δ of Reagan’s popular tax changes were. There is much progressive ground to be regained there. Elsewhere: not so much. But that hasn’t stopped the limp left from making believe.

You see, if you label anything that brings the government revenue a tax, which is fine in itself, then anything that is not an income tax is regressive by definition. Income taxes are called income taxes because they are levied against income and filed with evidence of it. Other taxes do not have 1040s attached to them so everyone pays the same price to receive the same benefit: this flat amount is a higher proportion of a poor person’s income. That’s regressive, case closed!

Except, the case is retarded. There have always been sources of government revenue that are not income taxes, or normally called taxes at all. Reason is, the world has limited resources. And if you charge for them, then people will use them responsibly. This is the foundation of our economy, and in areas where the government is ‘doing business,’ that is how it must behave. If passports were free, people that never leave the country would get one just in case. Motor vehicle registration fees, water utilities, the subway fare; countless things must be called a regressive tax if you apply unyielding definitions and/or ignore the demographics involved. Shall we abolish use fees, and require the government to expand enough to support newly unfettered demand while depriving it of yet another revenue source? Prevailing progressive logic in New York would require that.

But in reality—and here is where it gets pitiful—the shell of our progressive movement is unable to eliminate any the claimed regressive taxes either. Sales taxes, regressive with respect to income if anything is, are in no danger of repeal. The best and worst the movement can do is muck around with things like public transportation, by demanding that distance traveled not be accounted for in subway fares and that the flat fare be very low, leaving poor and rich with a subway system that is a disappointment to all. Thanks for that.

Capitalist socialist regressive frog people

Of the many ironies this situation presents, the most delicious is that the bastions of leftism in western Europe show no such antipathy to government use fees. Has anyone travelled in France? The Paris Metro is unabashedly zoned, and the government-owned national awesome train system is neither cheap nor lacking in aristocratic class seating divisions. Their high Autoroute tolls would quash the road trip urges of American college students. What are they thinking?!

They are probably thinking that by running government fairly at the core it is safe to let it sell consumable services without causing a peasant revolt. If you have sufficient and progressive income taxes paired with ‘social security’ that includes medical care for people of all ages, it’s okay for the government to sell things that not everyone can afford all the time because at least people are not starving or dying from curable disease. And by charging reasonable fees, you can offer nice, subsidized things to people of all income levels. You can have the SNCF instead of Amtrak.

And sorry, American left, it does not follow that when under a tax scheme warped for the wealthy you can gain progress by rebelling against government use fees. All that brings is decline and failure of the affected services, deepening the public’s belief that government can do nothing well. Public revenue as a proportion of the GDP therefore continues its downward spiral; people of all stations above homelessness resort to private hoarding (and bringing private spaces with them by automobile) to avoid contact with the disgusting public spaces and flimsy infra­structure bought by this Wal-Mart philosophy of taxation.

The left is as much to blame as the right for the poor state of public affairs. When it should be mounting earnest efforts to repair the tax code it is attacking other sources of revenue. In the recent congestion pricing non-vote in Albany, Democrats shot down our chance for better city streets and undermined cultural and financial support for public transportation. They could have bargained for income tax bracket adjustments in exchange for the new use fee, but they offered nothing, won nothing, and betrayed their commitments to the environment and public health all at once. This obstruction of progress will not be forgotten.

Use fees are our best hope for drying up the American political quagmire, but so far the only thing the legislative whole can agree on is bankruptcy.