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Posted By: Joann

OK. I'll throw a match into the tinderbox with a half-baked idea I've been kicking around the past week or so.

How about this statement: It is proper that people with higher incomes pay more taxes because they tend to use more of the services and benefits that taxes create.

People with higher incomes tend to:

Travel more. This means flying and the entire NTSB oversight, air traffic control, airport infrastructure that often has a meaningful federal component, all of it. Cruises, with port authorities and navigation information. And, of course, the National Weather Service and NOAA information systems that make sea and air travel possible on a commercial (as opposed to adventure activity) basis.

They own cars and use them - for travel and every other thing. The Fed highway system. The oversight on auto saftey, mileage and emissions. The fed highway safety system.

They tend to have much more access to health care than poor people. I know - someone will anecdotally bring up poor people getting "free health care" but the bottom line is that the people that have much freer access get much more benefit from medical research like NIH and CDC, from the hospital and doctor safety oversight apparatus, from the FDA and the Rx drug safety and eval programs.

They are much more likely to go to and send their children to colleges - often public universities that receive direct and indirect tax dollars. Sure poor people can go through this or that program. But there is simply no debating that many of the large public universities have student bodies that are not drawn largely from the "welfare class". It is from the middle class and higher.

They are voracious consumers - so here comes all of the consumer product safety regulations, the Customs Bureau, import controls, transportation and trucking oversight. Yes, poor people buy things. But they aren't outfitting a house and a cottage with plasma TV's and couches and appliances and everything else.

They invest - own stocks and the like. How much does the SEC cost to regulate this area, and how much of that benefit goes to someone that has to use food stamps for peanut butter.

And on the investment/savings note, the FDIC is no benefit at all to someone that doesn't have a nickel to their name and has never set foot in a bank.

But poor people use tax-provided benefits too, I know. There is Medicare, food stamps, public transportation, building safety and inspection systems geared to multi-unit housing.

But can we really say that 3% higher taxes on high income earners represents a total give-down to poor people.

Like everything else, I don't think it's that simple. No doubt people will have a lot of response to this and arguments as anecdotal as those I've just made. So no, I don't have numbers or data or facts or proof.

But I do think that there is some merit to the thinking that this is much more complicated than Taxpayer A handing cash dollars to Poor Person B to buy is bottle with.

Joann