Equal Protection of the Law

An article I read this weekend offered something I hadn't considered before, but seems to be growing on me. The Constitution, Amendment 14, guarantees "the equal protection of the law." In recent decades it has been used, wisely and legally, to help correct long-time injustices regarding race and gender, among other things.

So, then, why and how isn't it also applied to the obviously discriminatory progressive income tax? Is it OK to discriminate on the basis of economic class, but not on race or gender? That's a very dangerous premise, that it's legal/Constitutional (ignoring the moral or the ethical question) to treat one person differently than another because he is "different." (That brings to mind the famous exchange between Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald: "The rich are different!" "Yes, they have more money!") What, then, is to prevent a return to treating people differently on other bases, such as gender and race?

Of course, such laws, violating the 14th Amendment or not, are favored by politicians. They give the pols more power. Elected officials and their free-spending bureaucrats ("It's easy to spend other people's money.") get more money (or so they think, although history time and time again shows us that higher tax rates on the wealthy do no increase gov't tills nor do they do anything but create more unemployment--as Casey Stengel used to say, "You can look it up."), but they don't alienate the vast majority of voters who don't pay the higher rates.

How "equal" is it that some people pay large amounts of their income as taxes while others pay little or, increasingly, nothing, all because of what elected officials mandate? Where is the Constitution when all of this is done? Or, as seems to be more and more the case in other issues, is it merely an old document that is followed when expedient and ignored when not?

Why not let people determine their own taxes and tax rates by taxing, not income, but consumption? Tax gasoline, airline trips, alcohol, tobacco, etc., so-called "luxury items." (OK, I'd also add things such as I-pods/pads, cell phones, and the like to that list of "luxury items," but that's just me!) People can then pay more or less tax by buying more or less of stuff. (I love the word "stuff.") Then, discriminatory taxes are taken out of the hands of self-serving politicians.

This is, potentially, a slippery slope. Most people, not being the rich, are easily swayed by the idea of a progressive tax. They won't pay the higher rates. Again and again we must remember the words of Pastor Niemoller, "First they (the Nazis) came after the Jews. But I wasn't a Jew so I said nothing. Then they came after the Communists. But I wasn't a Communist so I said nothing. Then they came after the trade unionists. But I wasn't a trade unionist so I said nothing. Then they came after the.... But I wasn't a.... so I said nothing. Then they came after me. But there was no one left to say anything." It doesn't seem such a stretch any more, does it?