In taxation as in anything else, there is no such thing as an objective standard of "fairness." Fair is what we think is fair at any given time -- as this Wall Street Journal piece says, it's not resolvable scientifically but only "by a show of hands." But to get there, we have to accept a basic set of facts, starting with these four:
The top 5%, top 1% and top 0.1% of Americans have been getting a bigger slice of all the income and paying a growing share of federal taxes.
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Average tax rates have come down for everyone. On average, the tax bite on the rich is bigger—except for those whose income mainly comes from capital gains and dividends.
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The share of taxes paid by the bottom 40% of the population has been shrinking along with their share of income.
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The tax system narrows the gap between economic winners and losers, but not enough to stop the gap from widening.
Even agreeing on the facts doesn't stop us from viewing them from the lenses of our predispositions. Consider that top 5 percent. It is true both that they have averaged 28.4 percent of the income in the 2000s and paid 40.3 percent of the taxes. You may choose to argue that its unfair they take so much of the pie and I may choose to argue that they pay more than their fair share for the privilege. That doesn't make either one of us right. That's why fairness is such a dangerous standard. It's so elastic it can be defined by anybody in any way.
