For some people deeply convinced of an idea, usually an idea born of youthful experience, no quantity of evidence is sufficient to assuage the affliction of that conviction. For men of middle age and older, the prospect of the military draft was a life-altering experience. Young men from WWII until the Vietnam era were either drafted or had to find ways to avoid the military draft. Those with affluent parents or the academically gifted were many times able to avoid the draft or arrange for less dangerous service. The experience was real as Representative Charles Rangel (D-NY) knows. He served in the Army from 1948-1952 and earned a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star in the Korean War.
However, it has been over three decades since the institution of the all-volunteer army in 1973, and it is difficult for some people to rid themselves of the antiquated notion that only the disadvantaged or foolish would serve in the military. No allowance is made for those who serve out a patriotic feeling, or the thirst for adventure. No recognition is made for others who might benefit from the training offered in the military.
Rep. Rangel in the New York Daily News claimed, “The great majority of people bearing arms for this country in Iraq are from the poorer communities in our inner cities and rural areas.” On Fox News Sunday, Rangel was confronted with detailed evidence from the Heritage Foundation debunking this notion. It turns out that the military is over-represented by the middle class, not the poorest as Rangel claims.
Children from the poorest are much less likely to serve and children of the most affluent are slightly less likely to serve in the military. The household income of those who children choose to join the military is between $45,000 to $50,000, right about at the national median income. The graph below, from the Heritage Foundation report, shows the difference in the distributions between household incomes as a whole and the incomes of households producing military recruits. At the zero line, that income group contributes to the fraction of recruits in proportion to that groups fraction of the total population. Below the zero line represents income groups contributing less to recruits than their portion of the population. Income groups above the line are over contributing to the population of recruits.
Recruits do not represent the less capable of our society as Rangel seems to claim. On average, military recruits are more likely to have graduated from high school than the rest of the population in their age group.
Chris Wallace of Fox News asked the representative, “…isn’t the volunteer army better educated and more well-to-do than the general population? Confident of his original assertion, Rangel answered “Of course not.” He did not bother to offer any contrary evidence of his own nor did he attempt contradict the Heritage Foundation in any way. Rangel proffered the intellectual equivalent of It is true, because I said so. Rangel volunteered, “If a young fellow has an option of having a decent career or joining the Army to fight in Iraq, you can bet your life that he would not be in Iraq.”
Rangel was really engaging in a little too much projection on the part of himself and many of the like-minded on the Left. What he is really saying is that if he had had a decent career, he would not have joined the Army. He should be more careful about assuming this perspective on the part of others.
We Have Reached a Consensus on Tax Rates
Saturday, November 25th, 2006Over time, ideas can imperceptibly evolve from unthinkably naïve, to politically plausible, to conventional wisdom. The value of low marginal tax rates is one such idea that has taken root, at least in the United States. During World War II, the highest marginal tax rates were 94 percent. Given the economic demands of that war such confiscatory rates might be acceptable as a short-term expedient. However, marginal federal income rates remained over 90 per cent into the early 1960’s. Then President John Kennedy’s Administration worked to lower the top marginal rate to 77 percent with a resulting decade of high economic growth. The rates lingered in the 70-percent range through the 1960s and 1970s. As inflation cut in, more and more people were pushed into higher brackets and higher tax rates. By the 1970s, the US was suffering under double-digit inflation rates and unemployment rates of over 8 percent.
The Ronald Reagan became president in 1980. During the Reagan years the highest marginal tax rates gradually dropped from 50 per cent to 31 per cent, the result was higher growth rates, lower inflation, and lower unemployment. During the Clinton years in the 1990s the highest marginal rates increased to 39 per cent, higher than 31 per cent, but still very low by historical or international standards. The Bush tax cuts decreased the top marginal rate to 35 per cent, pretty much the average over the last 20 years. Democrats enjoy railing about the about how drastic the Bush tax cuts are and how they might raise taxes, but no one is talking about returning the rates of the 1970s, much less the confiscatory rates before 1980. The Reagan tax revolution has become about as permanent as anything gets in politics.
Unfortunately, this consensus has not reached a Europe that still languishes with marginal tax rates over 50 per cent. Since 1991, the United States with low rates has grown at the average annual rate of 3.3 percent, while Germany and France with high tax rates have managed only 1.4 percent and 2.0 percent, respectively. While these growth rates may not seem very different, compounded over many years they result in dramatic differences. From 1991 to 2004, Germany grew by 19.8 per cent, France by 29.4 per cent and the Unites States, by a whopping 52.5 per cent. If the US had grown as slowly as Germany, it would have to raise the mean current tax rate by over 25 percent to obtain the same of revenue it now achieves at lower rates. The Europeans remain too smart to see the value of low marginal tax rates.
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