I've also been a little astonished to see progressives acting as though opposition to "redistribution" is just some bizarre incoherent notion, because duh, almost all government programs redistribute money in some way. At first, I thought this was just a cute bit of sophistry, on par with claiming that all government programs are "faith based initiatives," because Congress must have "faith" that the program will accomplish its goals. After all, the past half century of political philosophy has been occupied with debates over whether and to what extent it's appropriate for the state to redistribute income, and all the parties to that debate at least seemed to acknowledge that they had a real disagreement about some intelligible question. But the argument appears to be offered in all sincerity. So maybe it's helpful to consider a few different types of distribution.At the very least, most government programs that require spending tax revenue will involve what I'm going to call incidental redistribution. Take the least controversial government functions, like national defense or courts. These are textbook cases of public goods requiring public provision--they're supposed to benefit everyone, but in such a way that people can't be individually excluded from the benefit provided. Hardcore libertarians will probably disagree, but a similar case can be made for public subsidy of general education in a democracy. Now, given that people vary widely in their ability to contribute tax revenue for such goods, even a flat tax means that people are going to kick in different amounts for these goods. So certainly there's a sense in which one might say provision of public goods involves "redistribution": People who can't afford to pay much, or anything at all, toward them at a given time nevertheless benefit from the funding provided by the better-off.
It's not especially helpful to talk about this as "redistribution" in the context of the historical debate over the idea. The justification for these programs is that they are a net benefit to everyone (or almost everyone) in society, including those who foot a disproportionate chunk of the bill for them. In terms of the Doctrine of Double Effect, most familiar from just war theory, we can say that redistribution is an inevitable consequence of the provision of public goods, but not the reason for which programs providing public goods are enacted. Redistribution of a sort occurs, but it is not the point.
Now there are two other kinds of redistribution, and here I think it may be helpful to reference an excellent paper by Joseph Raz on distributional equality, about which I hope to have more to say in a future post. First, we have what I'm going to call altruistic redistribution. What I'm talking about here is transfer programs aimed at helping the badly off, where the justification for the program is specifically the benefit to the worse-off, and not centrally any benefit to the people footing the bill. Obviously, both justifications may be in play with respect to a particular type of transfer. You may believe that all citizens in a democracy, including the very wealthy, benefit on net from public subsidy of education. But you may also believe that, quite apart from this rationale, we have a moral duty to ensure that the children of the poor have access to some threshold level of education, and that this would be the case, even if doing so were not a net benefit to the folks paying the bills.
Finally, we have what I'm going to call egalitarian redistribution, which is the view that resources should be transfered from the rich to the poor and middle class because economic equality is a good in itself. The idea here is not simply that we have a duty to provide folks who can't afford it with some basic minimum quality of life--say, by ensuring that they have things like health care or education or food--but that fairness independently requires a more equal distribution of resources, above and beyond whatever duty we might have to promote the welfare of the badly-off in absolute terms.
Now, I think Raz argues pretty persuasively that the argument for distributional equality as an intrinsic good is very weak. And indeed, I've argued on this very blog (though I'm not finding the post just now -- update: found it, link added) that most people who argue against income inequality don't really do so on the basis of the intrinsic-value egalitarian argument, even if some of them think they do. Still, this sort of argument does get made, so it makes sense to include it, because it's arguably the most pure rationale for redistribution--an argument for redistribution as such, independent of any particular benefit to which we might think the poor are entitled.
Within mainstream political discourse, just about everyone accepts the need for the first type of (incidental) redistribution. Most people are also on board with some level of altruistic redistribution, though there's obviously a pretty broad gradient here, especially as egalitarian redistributive arguments get thrown into the mix. You can probably make a "now we're just haggling price" move here against people who support only minimal altruistic redistribution, but there are probable plenty of points within the "altrustic" rubric where you can reasonably draw a line and say that redistribution beyond this threshold goes too far, even if political campaigns are poor fora to dive into the weeds and establish the precise location of that line.
So I'm just not terribly impressed with arguments that move from incidental redistribution, or even low-end altruistic redistribution, and proceed to the conclusion that it's somehow nutty or incoherent to deploy rhetoric that's skeptical of a "redistributive" philosophy of the role of government.
It seems to me that if you can see the difference between the Soviet leaders losing 10 million Russians in World War II, and the Nazis killing 11 million "undesireables", you ought to be able to tease out the distinction between redistribution as a goal, and redistribution as a side effect.
So which form(s) of redistribution do you think you are voting for when you vote for Sen. Obama?
Couldn't there be a utlilitarian argument for egalitarian redistrubtion?
If income inequality leads to a conspicuous inequality in consumptions, that could have some bad effects.
One would be the use of credit to narrow the gap, which I think is part of how we got into this crisis.
Another would be the possibility of crime and open revolt.
Wait, the Soviet leaders didn't lose 10 million Russians. The Germans killed them. And it wasn't like they were all even troops either, many were civilians. Like that isn't even a side effect of any policy decision, unless you think that surrender was a viable option.
Raz argues pretty persuasively that the argument for distributional equality as an intrinsic good is very weak.
So what he's saying is that sharing his PB&J really does make Barack a Communist.
Interesting.
You would think that a post about making distinctions between certain positions would refrain from generalizations included in that post. It is hard to see the value added of distinguishing between positions when you paints the current argument in such broad strokes, and with complete disregard for the context of the argument.
It is not as if McCain and Palin, who really brought the argument to the fore, were making specific claims about what type of redistribution is to be promoted. It was a broad argument against redistribution in general, and a false one, since their own programs may have different budgets, but are still the same type of redistribution.
To put it more succinctly, what are the differences between McCain's and Obama's policiies' that would enable one to say that they have different visions with regards to redistribution as an ends and redistribution as a side effect?
It IS nutty and incoherent to see a significant difference with regards to the logic of the distribution being employed here when the only real differences between the tax structure of the two candidates is a couple of % points at the highest bracket.
There is yet another very different kind of governmemt redistribution. "Unto him who hath, shall more be given" - especially if he who hath has tithed himself for political contributions. I suspect that the transaction costs of this form of redistribution are especially high.
When calculating what altruistic or egalitarian redistribution has taken place, this 'scriptural redistribution'needs to be netted off. In the USA the result looks positive; but in some of the more extreme kleptocracies, it appears negative.
So what he's saying is that sharing his PB&J really does make Barack a Communist.
Barack sharing his own PB&J makes him an admirable person. Barack sharing someone else's PB&J would make him a Communist.
Really, is the distinction that hard to grasp?
...when the only real differences between the tax structure of the two candidates is a couple of % points at the highest bracket.
Are you arguing that the reasons and purposes of spending make no difference, so long as the amounts are within a few percent of one another? This seems a difficult assertion to believe. Could you point me toward further support of this argument?
SG: apparently it's a bit too hard for you to grasp. "The argument for distributional equality as an intrinsic good is rather weak": is a state in which there are two people, each of whom has half a PB&J, morally superior to a state in which there are two people, one of whom has a PB&J and the other of whom has no snack at all?
In my kindergarten, we learned that if someone has no snack, they should be offered bites of everyone else's snack. The argument that there is nothing intrinsically moral about offering bites to the kid who has no snack would be interesting to see, since it runs counter to what American society traditionally teaches our five-year-olds.
If you just seen citizens as five-year olds perpetually, it becomes a lot easier to put down laws telling them how to live.
Brooksfoe,
Are you serious? When I was in kindergarten, that sort of sharing would have brought down the wrath of a lot of parents.
Things certainly have changed.
Now, if the kindergarten teacher asked for voulunteers to share, I wouldn't have any problem with that. But to forcibly take food away from some students to feed another student who should have had his/her own food seems to me to be the height of irresponsibility.
Squid,
In no point I said that the reasons and purposes of spending make no difference.
This argument over "redistribution" arose over Obama's proposal to roll back the Bush tax break for those at the top tax bracket. To see somehow a major difference in philosophy as it regards redistribution because one wants a ~35% tax and the other a ~39% is insane.
Similarly, if we look at the spending proposals, we'd come away with the same conclusion.
"To put it more succinctly, what are the differences between McCain's and Obama's policies' that would enable one to say that they have different visions with regards to redistribution as an ends and redistribution as a side effect?"
In an interview with Charles Gibson, Obama said that he would raise capital gains tax rates even if the increase would lead to lower tax revenues. Obama felt that it would be worth it to hurt everyone, through lower government revenues, in order to promote "fairness" by hurting the rich the most.
In other words, Obama explicitly supported an extreme form of egalitarian redistribution.
Rex, it may be that in the boot-camp survivalist kindergarten where you were sent, nobody was supposed to share with the kid whose parent didn't pack a snack -- perhaps that kid was instead supposed to be abandoned to the elements, to survive or not.
However, in public school in the US in the 1970s, and in private school outside the US in 2008, if a kid shows up without a snack, the other kids are supposed to share. The general sense is that humiliating one kid because of his parents' oversight is a bad, rather than a good, thing.
An addendum: this may have to do with the fact that asking 5-year-olds to "volunteer" to share their snack doesn't usually work so well, much as financial industry executives who escape with golden parachutes after raiding their employees' pension funds to "volunteer" to give back some of the money doesn't often produce much in the way of results.
The PB&J scenarios from kindergarten don't really get to the heart of the issue.
A better comparison would be if some children ate all of their Halloween candy at once, and didn't have as much to begin with because they didn't feel like trick-or-treating very long. Then in mid-November, little Barack Obama sees that some children are out of candy, but rather than giving them some of his own, he forcibly takes candy from the children who've been saving it to give to the children who gobbled up all of theirs the day after Halloween.
Yes, there may have been some children who couldn't trick or treat for whatever reason, and it would be very nice if Barack shared his own candy with those children and called on others to voluntarily follow his example. But the real question here is whether there's something noble in Barack stealing from those who saved their candy to reward those who preferred to eat it all at once. Barack would call that redistribution 'candy creation'.
No, Ann, that may be "the heart of" some other issue, but it is not the issue Julian Sanchez (referring to Raz) is talking about here. I repeat the quote:
"Raz argues pretty persuasively that the argument for distributional equality as an intrinsic good is very weak."
Your example presumes that all the kids started out with the same amount of candy. And you say it would be "nice" if kids who were prevented from trick-or-treating through no fault of their own were given some candy by the other kids. So you acknowledge that distributional equality is an intrinsic good, and you don't agree with Raz or Sanchez.
Whether the intrinsic good of distributional equality should be outweighed by issues of responsibility, fairness, ownership, etc. is a different question.
brooksfoe:
Did you read my comment? "Barack sharing his own PB&J makes him an admirable person."
I'm not disputing that sharing is admirable - I explicitly state that. I dispute that forcing someone to share is admirable. In fact, if you have to force someone, I submit that they're not sharing at all.
And where this analogy breaks down is that the teacher enforcing the sharing can be assumed not to want the PB&J. The teacher can be trusted to divide up the food fairly. But in the real world, the person doing the divvying up has an interest in what's being redistributed. Giving someone the power to establish distributional equality is asking for corruption. It also creates moral hazard for both the people receiving as well those producing, decreasing the size of the pool available for redistribution and making everyone poorer. Even if you were to accept forced redistribution in kindergarten, it hardly follows that it is a good model for society.
Clearly this lies on a spectrum. Some amount of redistribution is likely necessary. We wouldn't want to see children starve. But when fairness (as opposed to minimizing suffering/maximizing welfare) is the measure, I believe you're going too far.
But as long as we want to stick to what we learned in kindergarten, did you ever read about the Ant and the Grasshopper or the Little Red Hen? Don't those teach lessons about distributional equality too?
"In an interview with Charles Gibson, Obama said that he would raise capital gains tax rates even if the increase would lead to lower tax revenues. Obama felt that it would be worth it to hurt everyone, through lower government revenues, in order to promote "fairness" by hurting the rich the most."
I would love to have a direct quote or video.
So much of what the candidates have "said" is very different from what they actually said.
I would love to have a direct quote or video.
Here's the ABC transcript from the Democratic debate.
SG, I return to the line, which is what I was commenting on. "The argument for distributional equality as an intrinsic good is very weak." We are not talking about whether a certain good is better achieved through private or public means, whether the perverse consequences of trying to achieve that good in a particular fashion outweigh the positive ones, etc. What Sanchez is saying Raz claims here is that there is not much of an argument that, all other things being equal, goods should be divvied up equally. There's no mention here of who produced those goods, no mention of ant-vs-grasshopper wastrels, no mention of what the circumstances are. We could be in a "Lost" situation, where we've all crash landed on an island; is it intrinsically good to divvy up the available coconuts equally? All other things being equal, is egalitarian distribution good? To me, this is virtually as crazy as asking "Is fairness good?"
You're dealing with a host of other questions, which have their own issues. But it seems to me that to say that sharing your PB&J is admirable is equivalent to saying that Raz is wrong and that egalitarian distribution is intrinsically good. How that good gets put into play in society is a different question.
And SG, the point about raising the capital gains tax is that Charlie Gibson is an ignorant stooge. While cutting cap gains taxes raises revenues in the year following the cut as people delay stock sales until the cut takes effect, it decreases revenues dramatically over time. Similarly, when you raise cap gains taxes, revenues go down in the first year because (duh) people rush to sell before the tax hike takes effect. No serious economist believes that cutting cap gains taxes can increase revenue in the medium or long term, so the premise of the question is nonsense. Obama doesn't bother to explain that, because it's too complicated for the debate format. Instead he goes to the heart of the issue: the reason cap gains taxes are low is that low cap gains rates massively benefit the very wealthy. They barely help middle-class people, and they don't help poor people at all.
brooksfoe, I believe I understand the distinction you're trying to make, but I don't think I'm reading it the same way.
First of all, I don't interpret "The argument for distributional equality as an intrinsic good is very weak." to mean that distributional equality is not an intrinsic good, but that it's a very weak intrinsic good.
Secondly, "We could be in a "Lost" situation, where we've all crash landed on an island; is it intrinsically good to divvy up the available coconuts equally?"
Clearly not. In that situation we should give the most coconuts to those who are off foraging for food and the nursing mother. They have the highest caloric needs. If scarcity reigns, we should be very careful about allocating our scarce goods optimally. An equal distribution is almost guaranteed to be non-optimal.
Third, "to say that sharing your PB&J is admirable is equivalent to saying that Raz is wrong and that egalitarian distribution is intrinsically good." I can see why you think this, but it doesn't match my thinking.
I think the goal is not to equalize distribution, but to minimize harm. That might mean equal distribution, but then again it might not. Suppose the kid is allergic to peanuts; it would be better for him to go without than to share my PB&J. If you valued egalitarian distribution strongly enough, you would argue that we should both go hungry. Having us both go hungry I believe is the strong form of distributional equality and I reject that.
brooksfoe,
You're attributing a lot to Obama there, none of it backed up by his actual statements. Has Obama ever said lowering cap gains decreases long-term revenue? Has he ever said that raising cap gains taxes increase long term revenue? Do you have quote? During this campaign?
If not, we have no reason to believe he believes these things.
And I'm confused he had a long answer to the original Gibson questions, which was followed up with the above one. No where in there did he mention raising revenue. We also know from here:
articles.latimes.com/2008/jun/13/nation/na-campaign13 that Obama thinks the capital gains tax is fine for 95% of people. I fail to believe that replacing
"Well, Charlie, what I've said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness. "
with
"Well, Charlie, I don't think cutting the capital gains rates lead to long-term revenue growth. What I've said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.
would have been far too complicated to insert into the debate.
brooksfoe,
At some point you are going to have to stop replacing the stupid things Obama says with reasonable explanations of your own. There's no evidence that he actually thinks the things you say in his defense.
Really, how hard is it to say "Charlie, looking at one year at a time isn't appropriate; long term, lower rates mean lower revenues. And what's more, low rates benefit mostly people who trade often, who are mostly rich. The majority of middle-class stockholders are long-term investors who would suffer very little. We should instead [insert idea here]"?
Obama doesn't bother to explain that, because it's too complicated for the debate format.
Perhaps you're right, but I note that his response didn't reject the premise of question, it accepted the premise and gave fairness as his justification for the undesirable result.
As a side note, it seems that a lot of people, sometimes with radically different opinions, are voting for Obama because they don't believe that he means what he has said. Some of those people are bound to be disappointed over the next four years.
BTW, speaking of coconut distribution on Lost (I'm a bit behind - disk 1 of the 3rd season should be arriving from Netflix tomorrow.): Is the fat guy still fat? How is he managing to stay fat? Or is this just another one of the island's mysteries?
brooksfoe-
You should probably actually read the Raz paper, because the argument isn't quite what you suppose. Raz would fully agree that two people with half a sandwich each is better than one person with no sandwich, and another with a whole one. What he would disagree with is the claim that this is so because of the intrinsic value of *distributive equality*, as opposed to the intrinsic value of alleviating hunger.
To borrow one of his examples, nobody thinks it's morally important that (say) freckles or arm-hairs be equally distributed. People care about equality of goods that provide important benefits. What Raz is saying, and I agree, is that the benefit is what's doing all the moral work. Once you account for whatever moral reasons are provided by the value of alleviating hunger (and, to be sure, these will be equally strong reasons for each similarly situated hungry person) there's no ADDITIONAL reason provided by some independent value of distributional equality.
nobody thinks it's morally important that (say) freckles or arm-hairs be equally distributed.
I think there are several levels at which Raz would be wrong on this claim.
The first is, again, an intuitive five-year-old's understanding of equality. The fact is that the five-year-old doesn't usually care about the PB&J either. What he cares about is precisely equality itself, which is an expression of social standing. It is the humiliation of having no snack, when others have snacks, that is the injustice. While there are many things five-year-olds believe that are not true, this seems to me to be a case of a five-year-old beginning to develop the kinds of moral intuitions that do indeed continue to structure moral sense your whole life long.
I think this gets very close to the definition of the term "justice". And that brings me back to the sense that what Raz is trying to say is that justice or fairness itself is not intrinsically good. Which seems indefensible.
But it is 3 am where I live and I just finished writing what I was supposed to be writing while instead writing these posts, so I will leave reading the Raz paper for tomorrow.
What he cares about is precisely equality itself, which is an expression of social standing.
I'd suggest that anyone who is obsessed over what other people have as an expression of social standing needs to grow up and get a life. And I'd go further and suggest that if that's the sort of thing that drives you, you should damn well go earn your silly status goods rather than taxing others to give them to you for free.
I can forgive this attitude in 5-year-olds, but I find it hard to believe you're taking immature jealousy and elevating it to "justice," much less suggesting it is a sound basis for public policy. My moral intuition suggests that coveting that which is thy neighbors' is a moral failing, not a legitimate grievance.
It is the humiliation of having no snack, when others have snacks, that is the injustice
So the "injustice" is the humiliation?
What do you do about the kid who stutters when he talks? Do you make the rest of the kids stutter too, just so that kid won't be humiliated? What if the kid is horridly disfigured, do we multilate the other kids? Aren't those much, much worse social stigma? Isn't the ridicule they suffer much more humiliating?
And, see, you're painted yourself into a corner here. You can't claim that there's a difference between material goods and DNA's roll of the dice. You've explicitly said that what matters isn't material resourcee. You say that kid doesn't even care about the PB&J. No, you're talking about "equality" and "social standing," things which can and are based on a whole slew of things other than who has sandwich.
This has nothing to do with alleviating hunger, promoting health or even equality in resource distribution, it is you saying that "justice" is when the government forces everyone to be the same, for no other reason than the indignity of difference.
That's not only dangerous, but so ridiculous that this precise viewpoint is a caricature that people have satired. Harrison Bergeron, anyone?
Fine, then the "benefit" is the prevention of humiliation. In a way, you're proving Raz's point: You invoke an example that's supposed to show distributive equality really has some independent intrinsic value after all, but you end up falling back on some other more plausible good that equality serves instrumentally.
I'm quite fascinated by the discussion of PB&J equality. I'm with Glorious, that 'equality' cannot be a goal in and of itself-Communism just isn't morally viable, because there are different qualities of people, and it is good to let them flourish.
But what I'm curious about is why 'sharing the wealth' as a viable economic theory is dismissed. Obama's refrain has consistently been if you give more money to the middle class in tax cuts, college education, health care, green jobs, and infrastructure, then everyone (particularly the poor and middle class, but the rich to a lesser extent as well) will be better off. Its a purely pragmatic argument, with only the barest hints of 'equality for its own sake'.
Obviously, some progressives believe that being super-rich in a world where so many are starving is morally questionable, but the heart of my liberalism is that countries work better when the distribution of wealth isn't to one sided.
However, in public school in the US in the 1970s, and in private school outside the US in 2008, if a kid shows up without a snack, the other kids are supposed to share. The general sense is that humiliating one kid because of his parents' oversight is a bad, rather than a good, thing.
My memory of being five years old isn't too good, other than some vague snapshots of my own kindergarten class. However I do seem to recall that if left to the elements, I would have been a quick snack for two, possibly three wolves. Hence frequent and necessary intervention on my behalf by responsible adults.
Now that I am one of the responsible adults, I don't find analogies intended to speak to five year olds to be very compelling as a rational basis for broad social policy.
Now that I am one of the responsible adults, I don't find analogies intended to speak to five year olds to be very compelling as a rational basis for broad social policy.
So you oppose the imposition of a National Bedtime?
You are a wingnut.
The whole arguing by analogy phenomenon is fascinating. Obviously, easy on the human mind, but not so go on the policy we actually enact!
So, in direct contradiction to my own point, here's how I play the analogy:
if every kid has snack but one, the left out one is highly likely to respond in a loud, possibly destructive kind of way. Often a tantrum.
Is it worth forcing everyone to share a small amount of their snack with them, for the utilitarian purpose of keeping them happy?
But what I'm curious about is why 'sharing the wealth' as a viable economic theory is dismissed. Obama's refrain has consistently been if you give more money to the middle class in tax cuts, college education, health care, green jobs, and infrastructure, then everyone (particularly the poor and middle class, but the rich to a lesser extent as well) will be better off.
I don't think that's exactly what Obama has said. While he doesn't engage in a lot of "soak the rich" rhetoric ("It's not that I want to punish your success" - Obama to Joe the Plumber), I don't think he's claimed that his plans will benefit the rich. He acknowledges that they will lose under his plan, but he doesn't care (taking back the unfair gains they saw from Bush years).
And you know what? It's a reasonable, utilitarian, social democratic style plan. My concern is that it's a fairly big change from our historical practice, but it's being sold as just another tax cut. If "We the People" vote for a social democratic-style economy, then so be it. It's the bait-and-switch aspect that most bothers me.
SG-
I think there has been some campaign rhetoric that suggests the rich will at least do equally well with the new plan-that was the heart of his response to Joe the Plumber after all, that spreading the wealth helps everyone, particularly small business owners, who now have a larger customer base. His 'Pie' story which he tells in his stump speech revolves around suggesting to a restaurant owner that a larger middle class means more money for the rich.
Second, I'm not sure its that big a change from our historic practice-after all, its basically Clinton's tax plan, which we had 8 years ago, and its certainly much less weighted against the rich than what we had during say Nixon's administration.
In an interview with Charles Gibson, Obama said that he would raise capital gains tax rates even if the increase would lead to lower tax revenues. Obama felt that it would be worth it to hurt everyone, through lower government revenues, in order to promote "fairness" by hurting the rich the most...In other words, Obama explicitly supported an extreme form of egalitarian redistribution.
No; he supported a tax code that doesn't tax marginal income from capital gains at half the maximum rate for marginal wage income (including FICA and FIT).
It seems to me that if you can see the difference between the Soviet leaders losing 10 million Russians in World War II, and the Nazis killing 11 million "undesireables", you ought to be able to tease out the distinction between redistribution as a goal, and redistribution as a side effect.
Of course, Stalin killed plenty of "undesirables" too, although his criteria were different. I'm glad it wasn't my responsibility to decide which circles of hell ought to be inhabited by Hitler and Stalin.
Fine, then the "benefit" is the prevention of humiliation.
No, Julian, that's just a mask for a not very interesting kind of utilitarianism. It's always possible to claim that the "real" aim of any deontological norm is just the prevention of emotional distress caused by violations of the norm. It's possible to claim that justice itself has no intrinsic value -- it's just a means to preventing the suffering caused by the feeling of injustice. But that's sophistry. What I'm saying is that the feeling of social exclusion produced by socially sanctioned inequality is close to the definition of injustice. A kid who gets no snack, while everyone else gets a snack, is being treated unjustly by society in the same way as a black person who was not allowed to attend state college in 1950 was being treated unjustly by society.
Try this example. Say everyone is really hungry, and half a PB&J won't really do the trick. But there are only enough PB&J's for everyone to have a half. (We are as usual holding everything else equal here so as not to confuse the issue -- no fat kids, everyone equally hungry.) So, do you give everyone half a sandwich and all stay equally hungry? Or do you give half the kids a whole sandwich, and let the other half stay hungry? The latter solution may produce less total hunger. But if you think it is a morally acceptable solution, you will be barred from teaching kindergarten; if you tried it, you would be torn limb from limb the following day by angry parents. The hunger isn't doing the moral work here. The fairness is.
StLPastor-
You're getting to the reason why the 'Joe the Plumber' debate took off. The situation that Joe presented to Obama was that Joe is now just a plumber, but he's hoping to work hard and save up until he can eventually buy his own plumbing business. However he's wondering if it's worthwhile under Obama, since Obama just wants to tax him heavily if and when he's ever more successful.
Obama said something lame about how he didn't actually 'want' to punish Joe's success (collateral damage?), but that doesn't answer the incentive question - why work hard and save to build a future for yourself, when it's Obama's goal to make you 'share' your life's work with those that just messed around all those years while you sacrificed to get ahead?
As for the idea that we can create growth through redistibution ('give more money to the middle class' and everyone is better off), how do you hope to predict just exactly how much to bleed the rich before it becomes counter-productive? There may be some stimulative benefits to yanking money from some to give to others, but there's clearly also a strong incentive effect. It's far from obvious that the benefits of extra middle class spending outweigh the disincentives for people to work and save for the future.
In the extreme, we've seen how this system worked out - communism meant equality, and poverty, for all (except for a few corrupt party leaders that controlled the serfs). In its extreme, the policy that you're advocating leads to poverty and, by the way, the system was seen as deeply fundamentally unfair by most that were subjected to it. In moderation, it may or may not work, but there will certainly be offsetting effects.
I agree with SG - it's the bait and switch tactics that bother me. Saying that you're giving people a tax cut (better yet, tax 'relief') when they're already paying zero income taxes and you plan to send them a check in the mail is a dishonest, back door way to add a new welfare program. If it was a formal negative income tax system that incorporated incentives and got rid of meddling with food stamps, etc., I might even support it, but not when it's being done more as a way to bribe voters with taxpayer money, while lying about why they're getting checks.
"Perhaps you're right, but I note that his response didn't reject the premise of question, it accepted the premise and gave fairness as his justification for the undesirable result."
His justification for fairness was because poor people pay a higher tax rate than rich people under the capitol gains tax. Are you for regressive taxation? We've had progressive taxation ever since the 16th amendment, to paint Obama's position as some how "socialist" or out of the mainstream is extremely disingenuous.
Brooksfoe-
This may be a conversation best continued over e-mail, but I'm certainly not unsympathetic to the view you're advancing -- I pressed it against Raz a bit in correspondence. Nevertheless, I think he's ultimately on to something when he argues that the fairness-value here is epiphenomenal. That is, all the kids in your example have equally cogent claims to the satisfaction of their hunger, and perhaps also an added claim against the stigma of being treated as a second-class kindergarten citizen. But "fairness" here just means recognizing the equal strength of those reasons.
In any event, I don't want to clog Megan's comment section with the sort of protracted analysis that would be needed to hash this out properly, but drop a note if you want to get into the weeds.
Second, I'm not sure its that big a change from our historic practice-after all, its basically Clinton's tax plan, which we had 8 years ago, and its certainly much less weighted against the rich than what we had during say Nixon's administration.
It's not just the marginal income tax rate. It's the elimination of the FICA cap. And the increase in the cap gains rate. And the corporate tax rate. All told, it's a pretty big change at the upper end, especially when compared to the alternative.
Nor is it just the tax policy at the upper end. Those revenues are transferred (via "tax credits") to the low end. All told it adds up to a fairly direct wealth transfer done via the tax code.
I think that it's a pretty major change from historical practice. And that's all before it goes through a Democratic-controlled Congress. That said, I think there's a reasonable case to be made for a subsidy of low income workers. I'd rather see it done via simpler tax code (negative income tax) than an ever more complicated tax code, but that's a quibble. However that's not the argument I see being made. Instead this is being falsely sold as "tax cuts for the middle class".
I have a feeling that there's going to be a lot of actual middle class people with voter's remorse over the next four years.
Related op/ed worth reading, by Robert Samuelson in yesterday's IBD, "Poor Aren't Poor Because Rich Are Rich".