Lakoff Frames Progressive Taxation

George Lakoff wrote on Common Dreams yesterday about framing the issue of progresive taxation. Lakoff's main point is that the taxes provide protection and empowerment.

America’s government has at least two fundamental functions, protection and empowerment. Protection includes the police, firefighters, emergency services, public health, the military, and so on. Empowerment includes the infrastructure needed for business and everyday life: roads, communications systems, water supplies, public education, the banking system for loans and economic stability, the SEC for the stock market, the courts for enforcing contracts, air traffic control, support for basic science, our national parks and public buildings, and more. We are usually aware of protection. But the empowerment infrastructure, provided by taxes, is usually taken for granted, hidden, or ignored. Yet it is absolutely crucial, a fundamental truth about America and why America provides opportunity.

It should be the responsibility of the wealthy to invest in the empowerment infrastructure because it is what enables them to create their wealth. It seems they should gladly do so because they benefit the most from this infrastructure.

Ordinary people just drive on the highways; corporations send fleets of trucks. Ordinary people may get a bank loan for their mortgage; corporations borrow money to buy whole companies. Ordinary people rarely use the courts; most of the courts are used for corporate law and contract disputes. Corporations and their investors - those who have accumulated enough money beyond basic needs so they can invest - make much more use, compound use, of the empowering infrastructure provided by everybody’s tax money.

The wealthy have made greater use of the common good-they have been empowered by it in creating their wealth-and thus they have a greater moral obligation to sustain it. They are merely paying their debt to society in arrears and investing in future empowerment.

This is the fundamental truth that motivates progressive taxation.

It is a truth that undercuts conservative arguments about taxation. Taxes provide and maintain the protecting and empowering infrastructure that makes our income possible.

Lakoff concludes...

But this situation is threatened by conservative tax policy. Through unfair cuts in taxes paid by the wealthy, through payment for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and through borrowing abroad to pay for the tax cuts and Iraq, the common wealth is being drained and the infrastructure allowed to fall apart. We need to return to a fair tax policy that recognizes financial responsibility incurred by the compound use of America’s empowering infrastructure.

And if you need to be reminded about conservative tax policy take a look at my post earlier in the day.