"Taxes are penalties" works against "taxes are fair"

This is an exclusive, either/or argument. President Obama and his surrogates have consistently called it a penalty. Now, Roberts and the gop is calling it a tax.

Either way, they only ones that are making the taxes=penalty/penalty=taxes argument are the ones those norquistains (and "strategic far-sighted Duers) that have always made that argument.

No harm here.

Works both ways as a frame. It's just to pay your taxes to fund society. It's just to penalize poor conduct with punitive taxation.

Sidesteps that whole "punishing-success" thing. We're not punishing success, we're just taxing people justly.

They're neither just or injust, all on their own.

Pick your values.


Pick your taxation targets.

Pick your taxation levels.

Then you can evaluate "fair" or "unfair." Until you've done those three steps, you're burying your assumed values and making them inaccessible to discussion. Nice universalist thinking, but certainly biased.

There were even those who considered head taxes to be fair. (Often called "poll taxes," but "poll" meant "head" at the time and had no necessary connexion with elections. In a lot of jurisdictions you had to have paid your poll tax before you could vote, but in most of human history poll taxes existed in the absence of any popular elections, which involve one vote per head and were, in a sense, a head count.)

Some places in the US used to have a window or fireplace tax. I guess that's progressive and "fair," esp. if you had a one-fireplace or 3-window household exemption. I've heard of closet taxes, too.