NO INCOME TAX PAYERS

A recurring proposal by conservative candidates in the last several election cycles has been to expand the tax base; i. e., we need for those people who don't make enough income to pay income taxes to do so. Why should they pay? Because this relief is seen as unfair. They should pay like the rest of us. Never mind that they pay other taxes such as payroll taxes – FICA and medicare taxes – and sales taxes. Of course this is a question of equality – a central federalist value.

Here is how NBC News describes this tax “break”:

The Tax Policy Center researchers found that about half of the group [of non income tax payers] is basically exempt from federal income taxes because they are low income and also may have a large family. In a blog released not long after its report, the TPC explained that “a couple with two children earning less than $26,400 will pay no federal income tax this year because their $11,600 standard deduction and four exemptions of $3,700 each reduce their taxable income to zero.”

The other half are zeroing out their federal income tax bill with other provisions, such as itemized deductions or the child tax credit. Some are seniors who are living off Social Security. …

Not everyone who pays no federal income tax is in the lower income brackets. A separate report released last spring by the Internal Revenue Service found more than 35,000 people who made more than $200,000 in 2009 also managed to zero out their tax bills. That report noted that it generally takes a number of different credits and deductions for wealthy people to not pay any federal income taxes.¹

This lack of payment, as it refers to the lower end income earners, became a concern when presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, brought up this half of the population in his infamous 47% remark. Actually, the non-payers of income tax amount to about 46% of the population according to the account cited above. But okay; how would these people's lives be affected if they were charged with paying some minimal income tax? Of course, each case is different, but economist, Joseph E. Stiglitz, gives us an idea.

Stiglitz sets up a “typical” situation by looking at a household with one adult earner and two children – as in many single-parent family households. He has the earner working forty hours a week. The person earns just above minimum wage, $8.50 an hour or $16,640 a year. He or she pays $200 per month of his/her $750 per month health insurance bill (the employer picks up the rest). With this deduction, his/her take home pay for the year is $14,240 a year. Stiglitz has the family living in a two bedroom apartment for $700 a month which leaves the family with $5,840 a year to meet all other expenses. Car expenses – owning one is most likely a necessity in most localities in the US – uses up about $3,000 a year for the car, maintenance, fuel, insurance, and the like.² After this expense, the family is left with $2,840 or $3 a day. Now let me go beyond the Stiglitz situation; let's say one of the kids needs a bike to get to school and one day someone steals it or some such event takes place. Stuff happens. AND now let's have them pay some “minimal” income tax.

But didn't the cited article above note that the tax relief is in effect for earners who make roughly $10,000 more a year, remembering that that figure was for a family of four? Yes; that's about another $28 a day for a total of $31. Note that Stiglitz didn't include payroll taxes, clothing expenses, food, educational expenses, some entertainment, medical expenses not covered by insurance (like co-payments), and I suppose there are other things I can't think of right now. If you are in agreement with Mr. Romney, why not, for a few days, run the experiment and see if three members of your family can live on $31 a day. Millions of our fellow Americans have to do so on this or lower amounts. Here is a good time to remember that rates of long term unemployment – being out of work for more than six months – are at historic highs. I know; they wouldn't pay income tax because they have no income.

Let's add another element to this narrative. The comedian, Chris Rock, has, as part of one of his stand-up routines, the differences he sees between having a job and having a career. He begins by making the observation that in a job, one has too much time and in a career, one has too little time. Jobs are usually menial and time drags as one does specific activities such as – and this is his example – scrub those pans. But in a career, one is engaged in engaging work. One gets lost in it and often seems not to have enough time to do all one wants to accomplish. Lower income people have jobs, if they are lucky. But heck; they don't have to pay income tax.

1Linn, A. (2013). The 47 percent: Here's who pays no federal income tax. NBC.com. Retrieved from the Internet, see http://www.nbcnews.com/business/economywatch/47-percent-heres-who-pays-no-federal-income-tax-1B5956488 .

2Stiglitz, J. E. (2012). The price of inequality: How today's divided society endangers our future. New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company.

THE NATURALISM OF AUTONOMY

Most youngsters are bound to confront bullying of one sort or another. This is a definite problem and one parents and school personnel need to look out for and address. The victims of bullying are certain to feel something is wrong with such encounters. It brings up a very natural feeling on the part of a victim: I shouldn't be treated in this way. He or she might not have the words, but surely the person will probably feel that he or she has a ''right” not to be so treated. But who is to say that this is correct? From where do rights come?

One of our key founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, claims that liberty, the condition in which a person has rights, is bestowed upon us by God. Such a belief is given the name, natural rights. It is a claim based on a belief that cannot be proven: how do we know that rights come from God or nature? Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, doesn't even try to prove the claim; he simply states that the condition is self-evident. I just viewed a film clip in which the bishop from South Africa, Desmond Tutu, claims that his freedom comes from God. One can readily ask: if this is true; if it is so obvious, why did it take so much human history to elapse before a political system developed which held this belief as a foundational principle?

Of course, the notion of rights had already made some inroads in the political beliefs of Great Britain, but the American expression was, to date, the most clearly stated advocacy for institutionalizing rights based on constitutional guarantees and a formal legal system. Yes, the history of the development of freedom and rights can be traced to ancient Greece and even further back than that, but as a formal well thought-out institutional system of guarantees, history needed to wait for the American and French Revolutions. Since the ideal of rights was so slow in evolving and since there are so many places in the world that still do not have legal systems that honor the rights of its citizens, more current thought about rights questions how natural they are.

Rights become an issue only when a person is either the subject of indiscriminate punishment from another person or group or faces the choice of whether to do something he or she doesn't want to do in order to avoid an expected punishment at the hands of another party. For example, if a bully begins to punch another kid, this kid has a right not to be treated in such a way. Or, if that bully threatens another kid with physical harm if he doesn't give the bully his pocket change, the victim has a right not to be so threatened. Most cases in life in which questions of rights arise are due to one party exerting coercive power or threatening to exert such power on another person or group. The government resorts to this type of power to secure desired behaviors from its citizens. You might have experienced this while driving your car under a certain speed so as to avoid being ticketed. Not all types of coercive power are illegitimate. In order to define which cases are legitimate or not, the question of rights comes into play. Our nation is currently debating the rights Americans have concerning the ownership of certain types of weapons and the process by which people gain ownership of those and other weapons. Does government have the authority/the power to control that ownership and regulate the purchasing process by which weapons are bought?

Are there other exertions of power in which rights are not an issue? Yes. A person might do something he or she does not want to do for a variety of reasons. All power interactions do not relate to questions of rights. All them, though, occur when an individual does something other than what he or she wants to do because of some other person's or group's influence; this is the exertion of power by the second party over the first. But not all such interactions are examples of coercive power – power that is effective due to an expectation of some punishment. For example, you might want to continue smoking, but you stop because a doctor tells you to stop. While you might stop in order to avoid a punishing disease, the trigger for your decision is due to your belief in the expert opinion of your doctor – a case of expert power. Other forms of power that do not rely on the expectation of a punishment include referent power, reward power, and legitimate power.¹ In each of these other types of power, rights are not involved because the reasons you choose to behave as you do are not based on an expectation of illegitimate uses of coercive power. Are all such cases that emanate from government legitimate? No. And that is the job of the courts to determine if the law and the process by which punishment is to be or has been administered is legitimate according to the standards of our laws including our constitution.

With narrowing the type of situations in which rights become an issue, are we closer to determining from where rights come? I believe so. The academic, Richard Dagger, introduces a more conducive human attribute that one can more readily link to a natural origin.² That is, Dagger introduces the attribute, autonomy. According to this scholar, this state of being is viewed as one in which one can associate a sense of consciousness that one does not necessarily associate with freedom or liberty. Given this notion, I believe that this is more self-evident, since it brings into play decision-making. All this talk of power above assumes that the individual is striving to do what he or she wants to do. Here “wanting” needs a closer look. By highlighting what one wants to do, I mean it in its ultimate sense. That is, it includes times when we seek immediate, long term, gratifying, sacrificing, or any other type of aim or goal. Autonomy is the right to act according to such decisions. It is self-evident that we want to do what we want to do. And autonomy is the state in which one is not prohibited from behaving in ways that emanate from self-governing choices. Only humans go about this process consciously and, therefore, we as humans naturally seek this ability to self-govern our behavior.

Does this preclude a sense of natural rights? It does to a certain extent. It narrows our sense of the natural only to the extent it is seen as an ability to govern ourselves but not to protect, for natural reasons, specific rights. For example, one would question if one has a God given right to free speech: is freedom of speech a natural right or is it a civil right? Civil rights are rights established by civil authority – government. The advantage of naming a right civil as opposed to natural is that civil rights are formulated through reflection and that reflection is of historical analysis. Does it somehow diminish the importance of a right if it is designated as civil as opposed to natural? I suppose many would feel that it does. But in my mind, it does not. Here is a principle which, if accepted, will regulate how we socially and politically interact. It does not depend on a belief in God. It is formulated by a process of reflection and it is placed into law by design. It presupposes that upon reflection we understand the full or near full implications of not honoring the right. It also more readily lends itself to limitations where the exercise of the right interferes with the rights of others. It cannot be dismissed by a new interpretation of religious doctrine or religious text. It is more readily placed on a consequential view of morality: if we don't respect these rights, we can expect the quality of our society to be negatively affected – just look at historical case studies that demonstrate the consequences.

Last, it reflects the act of assenting or consenting. We are all equal in our consent. We are all equal in our need for autonomy – to be our own person. That that need is conscious within us cannot be denied. Even if one chooses a life of obedience, as in a religious life, the person consents to it.

1French, J. R. P., Jr. and Raven, B. (1967). The bases of power. In E. P. Hollander and R. G. Hunt (Eds.) Current perspectives in social psychology (pp. 504-512). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

2Dagger, R. (1997). Civic virtue: Rights, citizenship, and republican liberalism. New York, NY: Oxford.