people are all invisible, until you begin to look for them. Then, they suddenly appear everywhere. There are places where they can be seen in bunches: the emergency ward of a city hospital, the bus terminal in any town in America, the employment offices in the rundown section of the city, street corners at seven in the morning, the little-traveled roads and byways of the American countryside, the subways of New York City, the low-income housing projects, and the slums alongside. The man named “Wash” in Faulkner’s story, the “Assistant” of Bernard Malamud, the discarded athletic coach in John Updike’s Rabbit, Run—these are not fictional characters. There are millions of them in America, impoverished spiritually as well as economically.
Government spokesmen have tended to perpetuate the myth of classlessness. In August, 1961, testifying before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, Marriner Eccles, of the Federal Reserve Board made light of the rise in interest rates, which some people had charged would benefit banks and rich bondholders. Government bonds, he said “are very widely distributed.” But the Federal Reserve Bulletin of July 1959 indicated that 73 percent of all family spending units in the nation owned no savings bonds whatsoever, and of the total of 42.5 billions in savings bonds, 36 billion dollars was owned by 5 percent of the spending units.
The class nature of the American economy is reflected in the tax structure, but this is hidden from those without the time or training to study taxes. For instance, in President John F. Kennedy’s first administration he proposed a “tax cut.” Newspapers then talked endlessly of a “tax cut.” Everybody passed very quickly over the really crucial questions: how much of a cut for the rich, how much for the poor, how much for corporations, how much for families earning under $4000 a year. The president talked of an “across-the-board” tax cut, but an expert on tax law pointed to “a hidden tilt.” In Kennedy’s proposal, a married person with two dependents who earned $4580 a year would increase his take-home pay after taxes by $124. A married person with two dependents who earned $143,454 a year would increase his take-home pay after taxes by thousands of dollars.13
Taxation is loaded intrinsically with tensions of class, but these are concealed in newspaper reports and public statements, behind vague, general phrases which make no class differentiation. More than anyone, it is the low-income groups which are kept in the dark about the tax structure. The middle class has gone to college and can figure things fairly well. The upper class hires blue-chip accountants to do its figuring.
The great tax revolution of the past few decades consists of the shifting of the national tax burden onto the low and lower-middle groups. Glib percentage-quoters, talking of 90 percent from the rich, and only 20 percent from the poor, are evading the facts almost as much as the rich are evading taxes. In 1929, persons earning under $10,000 paid less than one-twentieth of the income tax revenue. By 1956, they paid two-thirds of the total revenue. On the other hand, taxpayers earning over $100,000 paid two-thirds of the total income tax revenue in 1929, but by 1956 paid only one-twentieth of total revenue. Today, five-sixths of the income tax comes from the lowest income-tax bracket, the 20 percent bracket.
Low-income people simply didn’t pay federal income taxes in 1929. Today, they do. A man with a wife and two children who earns $4000 needs every cent he can keep; but the federal government can take $240 of this in taxes. Even if the $100,000-earner were left with only $25,000 (which doesn’t happen), on whom is the burden greater? Chambers of commerce complain about “confiscatory” taxes, pointing to the 91 percent tax for incomes over $200,000, but nobody making that much pays 91 percent. In 1956, the Treasury took only about 37 percent of the over-$200,000 incomes. Fortune Magazine, not unfriendly to the rich, compared the high-bracket taxation situation to “dipping deeply into great incomes with a sieve.”
A survey made by the Brookings Institution in 1966 of the tax laws found that people with annual incomes over $ 1,000,000 paid out only 26.7 percent of their total income in Federal income taxes.14 In 1961, seventeen Americans with incomes over $1,000,000 and thirty-five with incomes over $500,000 paid no taxes.15 In that same year a Negro maintenance man I knew in Atlanta, with no savings, earning a dollar an hour, was called to the Internal Revenue Office to pay up several hundred dollars in back taxes. Not sophisticated in the ways of income-tax forms, he had done as so many in his class; he had gone to an “accountant” who charged five dollars for a hasty job of filling out his return.
The rich, instead of calling it salary, take much of their money in expense accounts, a popular way of increasing income without paying taxes. Perhaps five billion dollars a year are involved in expense accounts, which means that the Treasury, not taxing these, loses over a billion dollars. One dairy company executive and his wife deducted from taxable income $16,000 for a safari to Africa, on the ground that it publicized his business. Another manufacturer deducted $269,000 for a tropical island, fishing cruisers, and air transport, to entertain guests. Another deducted $10,000 to take customers to the Kentucky Derby. All these were allowed by the courts.
One researcher on the tax system, pointing to the hundred or so special provisions in the tax code, commented: “One thing virtually all the special provisions have in common is that however reasonable or meritorious they may seem, they help the upper-bracket taxpayer most and do little or nothing for the low-income group.” 16 He noted that the joint-return provision saved $40 for a man earning $4000 a year and $22,180 for someone earning $200,000 a year.
Congress’ most notorious tampering with the effect of taxation on income distribution in the postwar period was to grant a special depletion allowance of 27.5 percent of gross income for the oil industry, which went ahead in 1953 to take two billion dollars out of its taxable revenue. A Dartmouth professor showed the House Ways and Means Committee (which listened but did not act) that one company, over a twenty-year period, on an investment of $200,000, could write off $600,000 against taxes. Individual wage-earners have no comparable right to write off 50 percent of their net income each year for “depletion” as this oil company could do.17
Is America a class society—that is, a country of very rich and very poor? A clear-cut affirmative answer was always beclouded by the fact that in between the very rich and very poor was always that great middle class. In recent years, as the middle class has moved out to the suburbs, the picture became more stark; left in the city are the very rich and the very poor. All one needs to do is take a long walk through any large city in the United States, to affirm the fact that we are indeed a class society.
True, this is not unique to America. Everywhere you go in the world you see class societies. But there is one fact peculiar to the United States; we are the one country in the world that has no excuse for such contrasts of affluence and misery, because we are so enormously wealthy. One economist has noted how puny are the gestures we make, in our most generous moments, toward change: “A society whose gross income rises by $40 billion a year may even find the heart to give an annual increment of $1 billion for the most unfortunate of its poor. In the general structure of society and politics, this charity changes nothing.” 18
I have thrust quickly into the colonial picture and into the contemporary one to find a fact common to this country at its birth and in its maturity—the unjust distribution of its resources. I use the word “unjust” based on two criteria. One is the unheard-of wealth of this nation. The other is that modern ideal of equality, whether expressed in the Jeffersonian phrase that “all men are created equal” in the right to pursue happiness—or the Marxian idea that men should receive from an affluent society “according to their need.” The perception that all the lauded progress toward the welfare state has done little to alter that basic historic inequality might spur us to more radical solutions.
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