Tax Debate Misses the Point

Eileen Appelbaum's Sept. 20 U.S. News Economic Intelligence op-ed joins the fray on the election-year tax debate. Appelbaum, a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, is a past LERA president.

"Casting the tax debate as an argument in which liberals want to use the tax system to reduce income inequality after the fact by taxing the wealthy at higher rates than middle and lower income classes, while conservatives favor flat taxes that tax rich and poor at the same rate, misses the main point. Deregulation of the financial system over the last 35 years and tax preferences that benefit corporations and wealthy individuals have done much to increase the before-tax incomes of the top 1 percent.

"An army of tax accountants, many of them recruited from the IRS, has figured out how to push the envelope on tax avoidance for the big businesses and wealthy individuals that can afford their high-priced services. For these folks, tax accounting has been transformed from a service that makes sure that required taxes are paid to a profit center that manipulates the tax code to generate huge returns at the expense of the tax-paying public. Increasingly what we see in the United States is the growing importance of tax-payer financed capitalism. ..." <Read more>

First published by U.S. News online on Sept. 20, 2012.