Re: On redistributionary taxation
It's possible I'm overly paranoid, but what I'm worried about isn't leftist vs. rightist. It's this mythology that's been created, partly in response to this problem, that people who are young and smart are the "privileged", the "elite", the "lucky few", the "1%", and on and on, and how we must "give back" by having large chunks of our salary stolen (via taxes) and rent/mortgage stolen (via rent control, mortgage subsidies, etc.) (and this isn't even enough; a San Francisco protest recently burned Google in effigy to protest Google not "giving back" to the "community") to fund people who are largely wealthier than us and who are overwhelmingly more politically powerful. (Eg. even though almost everything you see describes teachers as "poor" and Burning Man as "for the rich", the median teacher makes more than the median Burner, not counting benefits, pensions, early retirement, job security, etc. etc. which all teachers have and almost all Burners do not.) Challenging this is, not like saying such-and-such law is a good/bad idea, but directly claiming higher status for me personally, like a senator writing an article saying senators should get much higher salaries (which they should, but I digress).
It's possible I missed something, but I did check before making this claim and I do think it holds
(and FWIW I am not the only one to have noticed or claimed this, Elizabeth Warren wrote about it in The Two-Income Trap)
Paid for by employers, not employees
(and what a doozy it is to pay for! Not because of the amount, but because