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Jonah Goldberg, Anti-Maldistributionist
by Tom Schaller @ 10:55 AM
Oh, what the heck: Let’s piggyback on my post yesterday with a post addressing another canard from Jonah Goldberg’s platitude-filled column Tuesday in USA Today. After hailing the tea partiers’ understanding of how taxes are inimical to liberty, he writes:
Individual liberty is far from the only concern, either. The kind of country we want to be is deeply bound up in taxation. The Tax Foundation estimates that some 60% of American families already get more from the government than they pay in taxes (and the top 10% of earners pay more than 70% of the income taxes). If all of President Obama’s plans are enacted, that percentage will increase. We are heading toward being a country where instead of the people deciding how much money the government should have, the government decides how much money the people should have.
Only after they passed "ObamaCare" did Democrats clarify that this was one of their motives. ObamaCare’s appeal has less to do with saving money — which it won’t do — and more to do with spreading the wealth around. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., recently admitted that alleviating the "maldistribution of income in America" from the haves to the have-nots is one of the legislation’s real benefits.Ah, so the real problem with the American tax code is that it does such a great job (which is to say dastardly job, in Goldberg’s view) of redistributing income and wealth–of robbing Peter to pay Paul. Again, this is an empirical issue, not merely a conveniently assertable talking point, which means we can examine just how redistributive America is relative to comparable nations.
Back we go to the OECD data. The above figure reports, for all OECD nations during the mid-2000s*, the Gini Coefficient before taxes and transfers. For those unfamiliar with the Gini Coefficient, it is a measure of the distribution of income (or wealth), bounded between 0 and 1, with zero meaning equal distribution across all citizens and 1 meaning that all the income/wealth belongs to the one, richest person. That is, the lower the number the more evenly–though not necessarily fairly, which is a normative judgment for each person to make for herself–income is distributed prior to (or after) government activity in the form of taxes and/or transfers.
As you can see, the before-taxes-and-transfers Gini Coefficient for the United States (.46) is very close to the average for all nations of the OECD (.45). Put another way, the ex ante maldistribution of income here is about the same as for comparable nations. To see what the net effect of those government policies are, we need to look next at the after-tax-and-transfer Gini Coefficients. CONTINUED
FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: Jonah Goldberg, Anti-Maldistributionist
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