REDEFINING PATRIOTISM

“Joe Biden isn’t backing down from his startling claim last week that raising taxes on the rich is the ‘patriotic’ thing to do. [In fact,] he upped the ante, thundering that he also has Jesus in his corner. ‘Catholic social doctrine as I was taught it is, you take care of people who need the help the most,’ Mr. Biden preached to a group of union supporters... We won’t get into a theological debate with Mr. Biden, except to say that Biblical tax rates tended to run around 10%, not the 39.6%-plus that Barack Obama’s tax plan calls for. As for patriotism, maybe the young Joe Biden missed school the day the Boston Tea Party was being taught. There’s also the point that if you want to finance a war, you need a strong enough economy to throw off the tax revenues to pay for it. As we learned in the 1980s under Reagan, lower taxes that help an economy grow can finance a defense buildup that helps win the Cold War. By that standard, cuts in marginal income tax rates deserve to be called patriotic. Regarding taxes and social justice, the issue is whether the high taxes that Mr. Biden favors promote economic growth and prosperity, not least for America’s poorest citizens. There he doesn’t have evidence on his side. Studies from around the world, including the annual Wall Street Journal-Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedom, conclusively indicate that countries that keep taxes low tend to have the least amount of poverty. As for fairness, we’d note that today the top 1% of taxpayers pay twice as large a share of income taxes (39%) at a 35% rate than they did in 1980, when they were taxed at a rate of 70% yet paid only 19% of income taxes. In that sense, the tax code is more ‘progressive’ now. By the way, Mr. Biden and his wife recently released their tax returns, and they reported an average of $380, or 0.2% of their income, in annual charitable contributions over a 10-year period. The national average was about 2% of income.” —The Wall Street Journal