The art of taxing fairly is messy

"The rich should pay their fair share of taxes." Who can argue with that? But then we must decide who is rich and what is meant by fair. Neither political party has distinguished itself in making such distinctions. But Republicans play an especially outrageous game in portraying the Internal Revenue Service as the working stiff's enemy. For salaried workers, taxes come straight out of paychecks, meaning most are already paying what they owe. Owners of small businesses have more deductions at their disposal, but the neighborhood bakery that tries to follow the rules doesn't have much to fear. When Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act funded the hiring of about 15,000 IRS employees, however, Republicans played the public for boobs. "Are they (the IRS) going to have a strike force that goes in with AK-15s already loaded, ready to shoot some small-business person in Iowa?" Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Iowa Republican, asked on Fox News. In reality, criminal investigation special agents go only after serious tax cheats, and just 2,000 of them are armed. These cases involve destroying records, double-bookkeeping and the like. They aren't persecuting taxpayers whose math was innocently off or were even negligent. And so to address Grassley's complaint: If some small business person in Iowa is engaged in money laundering, narcotics trafficking or major league fraud, then yes, armed IRS agents may come to visit. The IRS employed about 102,000 people at the beginning of Donald Trump's second term. Staffing has been cut down to about 74,000. Not only are there fewer agents going after tax dodgers, but there are also fewer customer support workers able to answer ordinary people's tax questions. The chief beneficiaries of lax tax enforcement are the rich who employ squads of accountants to hide income or manufacture unlawful deductions. The tax code already favors them. For example, capital-gains taxes — which are paid after selling stock or other assets — can pay taxes at a lower rate than wages. That's why Meta magnate Mark Zuckerberg has himself paid a salary of only a dollar a year. He is lavishly compensated through a cargo-ship-sized pile of securities and other assets taxed at the lower capital-gains rate. There are reasons for treating capital gains differently from earned income, but must the tax advantage for the former be so big? Democrats crusading for more tax "fairness" have this foolish habit of targeting their own rich residents. The proposal in Democratic-controlled California to slap a one-time 5% tax on everything a billionaire owns is nuts. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom wisely opposes this utterly complicated scheme, which it seems would force some Californians to add up the value of their vintage watches, boats and paintings for tax purposes. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, meanwhile, weaves myriad proposals for raising taxes in ways that would seep deep into the middle class. What the California and New York tax proposals have in common is providing an incentive for the rich to move elsewhere. It's not like these places don't already tax the top incomes. Many very rich people have continued to live in these jurisdictions for their economic vitality, schools, cultural institutions and other amenities. And they pay almost all the income taxes. But they have limits. It's one thing to tax them. It's another to portray taxing them as a means of punishment. Tax reform that closes loopholes and special deals benefiting the super-rich much be done at the national level. The IRS doesn't make tax laws. It is federal agency that collects taxes and enforces the laws. Middle-income and "merely affluent" Americans should recognize this: The taxes that the richest among us don't pay are taxes that they pay. Follow Froma Harrop on X @FromaHarrop.