Fair for whom?

I'm beginning to wonder if Professor Mankiw moonlights as an editorial page writer for the Wall Street Journal. In this piece from Sunday's NYTimes, Mankiw may as well be screaming "Lucky Duckies" about the group of Americans paying only 4.5% of their income in federal taxes.

Mankiw asserts that economists should leave normative debates out of economic analyses, then cites the Rawls vs. Nozick philosophical debate to imply that there just isn't any answer about what is or isn't fair from the economic realm. It's obvious, however, that Mankiw falls clearly on the Nozick side of the fence and that is really the point: you can't hide your bias behind a set of tools. The bias informs the tools used, the use of the tools, and the questions that get asked and answered by the tools. As long as economics remains a social science, the normative side is vital and economists need not shy away from those arguments.

Specific to the analysis of federal tax rates, a side by side comparison of the changes in pre-tax income in addition to effective tax rates over time for the same groups of taxpayers would be a bare minimum starting point for a balanced look. Excluding notoriously regressive state taxes is a bit suspect as well. Adding those elements would clearly show that incomes have diverged wildly over the last 30 years and the tax code has only made it worse. This should be ground zero for a discussion over tax rates, not Mankiw's singular snapshot. Even at this ground zero we should acknowledge that collecting taxes is simply the mechanism by which we pay for civilization. The discussion then follows with what we've already committed to funding and how best to achieve this funding target. Since Mankiw is biased toward a more limited role for government, we should at least force him to spell out what he wants to cut if he thinks taxes are too high (especially since we have a deficit that will force taxes higher than they presently are).