AOC’s and Bernie’s “Fair Share” Con Is Idiotic and Anti-Biblical

The phrase has become a liturgical chant of the modern left. “Fair share.” It rolls off the tongues of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with the smooth assurance of people who never expect to be asked a follow-up question. And remarkably, they almost never are. The slogan is treated as self-evidently true, an article of faith that requires neither definition nor defense. But strip the rhetoric down to its arithmetic, and a curious thing happens. The numbers refuse to cooperate with the narrative.

Writing this past weekend in a Fox News opinion piece, financial advisor Ted Jenkin laid out the math that populist class warriors prefer to keep buried beneath the slogans. According to Internal Revenue Service data and analysis by the Tax Foundation, the top one percent of American earners already pay roughly 40 percent of all federal income taxes. The top ten percent shoulder closer to 70 percent of the total. Meanwhile, nearly half of all Americans pay little or no federal income tax in a given year. Those are not opinions. Those are receipts.

So when a senator from Vermont waves his finger at a rally and declares that the wealthy must finally pay their fair share, the honest journalist’s first job is to ask a simple question. Compared to what? If 40 percent is not enough, is 50? Is 60? Is 80? At what numerical threshold does the moral debt finally come due? The silence on this point is not accidental. It is the entire business model of the rhetoric.

The Tax Stack Nobody Mentions on Cable News

The clever sleight of hand in the “fair share” debate is that critics confine the conversation to federal income tax, as though that single line on a W-2 represented the totality of what an American household sends to government. It does not. Jenkin walks through six distinct layers, and each one bites a different chunk out of the same dollar.

Top federal marginal rates already reach 37 percent. Add California or New York state income tax, and the combined hit climbs into the mid-50s. Homeowners in New Jersey or Texas write annual property tax checks that can run from $10,000 to $30,000 or more, an ongoing rent paid to the state for the privilege of holding title. Every dollar that survives those layers is then taxed again at the cash register, with combined sales taxes nearing 10 percent in places like Tennessee and Washington.

Invest what is left, and the federal capital gains tax plus the Net Investment Income Tax can push the rate north of 23.8 percent before any state takes its slice. This is the part of the system most often ignored. Capital gains are paid on after-tax dollars that were saved, risked, and grown. The principal has already been taxed at ordinary rates. The gain is then taxed again. Build a business over three decades, employ hundreds of people, pay tax on every distribution along the way, and the government still expects another pound of flesh when you finally sell. Estate taxes can take one more bite when the wealth is transferred to heirs.

A Slogan That Refuses to Be Quantified

The genius of “fair share” as political language is that it cannot be falsified. Set a target, and the activists will move the goalposts the moment you hit it. Pay 30 percent of all federal taxes? You should pay 40. Pay 40? Now it should be 50. The phrase is engineered to remain forever unmet, which conveniently keeps the political grievance permanently fresh.

Until someone can clearly define what “fair share” actually means in real dollars, real percentages, and real outcomes, it remains exactly what it is today. A soundbite and a slogan. And those two things don’t balance our budget.

That observation from Jenkin is the heart of the matter. A republic cannot legislate by slogan. Numbers require numbers in return. When Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez address crowds of tens of thousands and rail against oligarchy, they are selling a feeling, not a policy. And feelings, however thunderously delivered, do not retire $40 trillion in national debt.

The Spending Problem That Dares Not Speak Its Name

Here is the part of the debate the populists work hardest to suppress. Even if every dollar of the wealthiest Americans’ annual income were confiscated outright, it would not close the federal deficit for long, let alone retire the debt. The math has been run repeatedly by analysts across the political spectrum. The United States does not have a revenue shortage in any meaningful structural sense. It has a spending addiction. Washington has made promises that no realistic tax regime can fund.

To insist that the answer lies in soaking the productive class is to misdiagnose the patient. The federal government in the current fiscal year is running deficits that exceed what could be raised by a 100 percent tax on every billionaire in America. The arithmetic is brutal, and it is precisely why the populist left avoids it. Defining “fair share” in real numbers would expose the lie. The wealthy are not the problem. Congress is.

What Scripture Has to Say About Coveting Another Man’s House

There is an older language for what the “fair share” crusade actually is. The Tenth Commandment did not stutter. “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s.” The prohibition is on the disordered desire itself, not merely on the act of theft. Covetousness corrupts the heart before it ever picks the lock.

Modern progressive economics has built an entire political movement on the systematic cultivation of covetousness. The grievance is the product. The envy is the engine. And the slogan “fair share” is the marketing copy designed to baptize a covetous demand in the language of justice. There is nothing just about taking from one man because another man wishes he had it. The Apostle Paul, in his letter to the Ephesians, instructs the thief to “steal no more, but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth.” Labor, not legislation by envy, is the Biblical answer to need.

Behavior Changes When You Punish Production

The practical case against the wealth-tax fantasy is just as devastating as the moral one. People respond to incentives. When you raise the cost of building, investing, and hiring, you get less of it. The productive class does not simply hand over more money while continuing to produce at the same pace. They restructure, they relocate, they retire, they shelter. Capital is the most mobile asset in the modern economy. Tax it punitively in California, and watch it migrate to Florida, Texas, or Tennessee, as it already has by the hundreds of billions over the past five years.

The jobs go with it. The factories go with it. The philanthropic giving goes with it. The tax base itself goes with it, leaving the high-tax state poorer than before and the politicians who lit the match nursing a self-inflicted wound while blaming the people who fled.

Defining the Terms or Forfeiting the Argument

It is past time to insist on definitions. Every politician who deploys the phrase “fair share” should be required, by interviewers who actually do their jobs, to answer four questions. What percentage of total federal taxes should the top one percent pay? At what specific income should the highest marginal rate apply? What is the targeted total revenue increase? And how much of the resulting revenue will go to deficit reduction rather than new spending? Until those questions are answered with numbers, the speaker is not making an economic argument. He is conducting a séance.

The American taxpayer, top to bottom, deserves better than incantation. Jenkin is right that this is not about defending billionaires. It is about defending arithmetic, defending incentives, and defending the system of free enterprise that has lifted more human beings out of poverty than every redistribution scheme in recorded history combined. A government that cannot define what it wants from its citizens, but is certain it wants more, is not pursuing justice. It is pursuing power.

The wealthy in America already pay more than their fair share by any honest accounting. The real scandal is in the marble corridors of the Capitol, where men and women who have never balanced a checkbook in their professional lives spend trillions they do not have, blame the people who actually generate the wealth, and then demand applause for their compassion. The applause is unearned. The math, as always, is patient. And eventually, the math wins.