Keith O'Brien Quotes
My message to David Cameron, as the head of our government, is to seriously think again about this Robin Hood tax, the tax to help the poor by taking a little bit from the rich.
O'Brien, Keith. Interview. Sunday Headlines, BBC Radio Scotland, 22 Jan. 2012.
The nation rejected the flat tax that was favored by conservatives in the 1930s. However, in the Republican Presidential Primary Campaign of 2000, candidate Steve Forbes made the flat tax a centerpoint of his campaign. He lost badly, but the idea caught on amongst some conservative Republicans, and has had some support since.
“Profiteers” had two general meanings at the time: First there was the specific set of industrialists who had made large profits out of the First World War. For many it also included capitalists who made large profits.
An income tax had been instituted during the Civil War but had lapsed. Existing taxes were all excise or head taxes—very regressive. Later there was a political movement to bring back the income tax with the intention of taxing all income equally. There was a titanic struggle which culminated in a Constitutional Amendment allowing the income tax. None of the original politicians, for or against, the income tax could never imagine an income tax that would charge lower rates for investment income. That was the entire purpose of the income tax at the beginning—to tax investment (unearned) income. The “capital gains tax” was the creative way of the rich getting back some of what they thought the lost when the income tax was instituted.
Keith Michael Patrick O'Brien was a Scottish Catholic cardinal. He was the Archbishop of Saint Andrews and Edinburgh from 1985 to 2013.
