Timothy Noah Quotes
You know what isn't class warfare? Progressive taxation, as in, say, expecting billionaires to pay at least as much in taxes as their secretaries. Ideally, in fact, they should pay more.
Noah, Timothy. The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do about It. Bloomsbury Press, 2012.
Comment made in the Congressional Congress debates in 1787. This precedes individual taxation. In the debate, Wilson felt state taxation “should accord with the number of freemen” as “it is strange that annexing the name of ‘State’ to ten thousand men, should give them an equal right with forty thousand.”
As a result of years of lobbying many vested interests were getting tax exemptions for their activities. Some of the richest corporations and people paid little or no taxes. This was like the old European monarchies where the dukes and nobles got tax exemptions from the king and the middle class and poor people paid a much larger percentage of their income and wealth than did the nobility. Fairness in taxation is very difficult in practice. See {633629}
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.
Even on Medieval days in Europe, the wealthy barons paid lower tax rates that their lowest peasants. Relief from taxes was one of the privileges of the very rich. The practice has been made more cosmetic, but the result seems to have been the same into the 21st century.
Timothy Robert Noah (born 1958) is an American journalist and author. Previously he was labor policy editor for Politico, a contributing writer at MSNBC.com, a senior editor of The New Republic, where he wrote the "TRB From Washington" column, and a senior writer at Slate, where for a decade he wrote the "Chatterbox" column. In April 2012 Noah published a book, The Great Divergence, about income inequality in the United States.
