World Hunger and Poverty

There has been a lot of frustration over the massive amount of pay, bonuses and luxuries given to the executives at failing banks which together received hundreds of billions of dollars from the U.S. government. Indeed, it leaves us asking why rich people get bailout money to pay for private jets and unnecessarily lavish Superbowl parties when working class people need bailout money just to pay for food, clothes, shelter and health care. In response, some people including President Obama have called for capping the pay of executives at banks that receive bailout money.

But the highly paid chief executive of Netflix, Reed Hastings, has asked for the taxes of executives like himself to be raised. In his op-ed entitled Please Raise My Taxes, Hastings writes, “Instead of trying to shame companies and executives, the president should take advantage of our success by using our outsized earnings to pay for the needs of our nation.”

That idea interests me. And I like when one of the very rich suggests it. At the very least, we could raise the richest people’s taxes enough so that they are no longer paying a smaller percentage of their income in taxes than the rest of us.

Anyway, stopping and undoing the recent economic crisis will cost a lot, but we do need to do it. The recent economic crisis has pushed many people deeper into poverty, many people into poverty and still pushes many people closer and closer to poverty. Raising the taxes of the extremely rich can help fund the costs of reversing the recent economic crisis.

However, poverty is not a new problem. Even before the economic recession, millions of Americans and billions of people worldwide lived in poverty. Even then, working class people still worked too hard for too little pay in a society riddled with corruption and social, political and economic unfairness. Even then, a lot of people were poor who would not have been poor and a lot of people were very rich who would not have been so rich had it not been for the corruption and unfairness.

I believe we can not only reverse the recent recession but also eradicate poverty completely. Just like reversing the recession, eradicating poverty will require an investment that costs a lot upfront. But that investment can permanently solve a very costly problem. In analogy, we can spend $1,000 once to fix the hole in a boat today rather than spend $10 a day to desperately scoop water out of the sinking boat.

Ideally speaking, I see a society in which nobody suffers from poverty, where people don’t go hungry and homeless down the street from an overstocked grocery store and a vacant house. In that ideal society, neither taxes nor government spending would be needed. So one could say I ideally want taxes to be reduced and even eliminated if possible. But noting the difference between theoretical ideals and practical steps, increasing taxes on the richest of the rich in our current messed up society seems like an effective and appropriate way to raise funds to make the investment to push us closer to that ideal society.

What do you think? Do you support raising the taxes of the very rich? Why or why not? Join the discussion and tell us your thoughts in this thread at the Philosophy Forum.

According to recent IRS data, from 2000 to 2006 the income of the 400 richest Americans doubled, but their tax rate fell by a third to only 17.2 percent.

The drop in the tax rate for the richest Americans is due mainly to ex-President Bush’s push to lower the capital gains tax to 15 percent in 2003.

As pointed out in my post Bob Edgar Stresses Poverty, Bush also drastically increased government spending, leaving even more government debt for working class taxpayers to pay since the rich people’s tax rate was decreased. In other words, Bush increased the total amount that the taxpayers have to pay by increasing government spending, but he changed the proportions so that rich people pay less of it while the rest of us pay more of it.

I also ask you to remember that the richest people in America pay less in taxes than their secretaries in percentage of income.

I think those policies of the Bush Administration and the mostly Republican legislature contributed to the current economic crisis. Worse yet, many politicians actually continue to propose the same policies as a solution to the problem. For example, Republican politicians are actually suggesting changing the “stimulus package” to include more Bush-type tax cuts for the rich while eliminating tax credits for the working class.

Please tell us your thoughts about this topic at the Philosophy of Politics Online Forum in threads such as this one.