I still remember what it was like to be poor. This might help explain why I have a heart for those who are in poverty now. When I sit down to determine who to support with my regular giving, God points me to those who defend and minister to the poor and hurting.

Given my heart for the poor, I find it hard to believe that I’m about to come to the defense of the rich. Believe me, no one’s more surprised than I. But someone has to. The rich have been taking an undeserved beating in the court of public opinion lately, yet when they try to defend themselves, they only make it worse. It’s an injustice, really, and that tugs at me too.

The potshots at rich people grow to a fusillade whenever tax cuts are the topic of the day. If you want to derail a tax-cutting plan, just tell the public that it’s nothing more than a "rich get richer" scheme; support for the plan will dry up in a hurry. The rich make for an easy target on this one: It’s not hard for crafty critics to present just about any proposed tax cut as a prize to the wealthy. Shame on those greedy rich people.

What’s lost in all the fuss is the larger truth: Excessive taxes hurt everyone – the rich, the poor, the in-between. Last month I showed you how a tax plan intended to stimulate the economy can have exactly the opposite effect, with dire consequences to the part-time paychecks that may be funding your education right now, as well as to the job market you’ll face when you graduate. (If you missed it, check out Gimme a (Tax) Break .

This month we’ll look at why the rich are being unjustly set up as the unworthy poster children of a tax cut – and who really benefits from lower taxes. You’re among the winners, so you might want to pay attention.

Creepy Taxes
Some people are never satisfied. They holler and moan for lower taxes, but as soon as you give them what they want, they demand still another tax break. And because greed begets greed, rich people are the most demanding of all.

Nice sound bite, but let’s look at the facts: To not cut taxes is the same as raising them. It’s true. Without periodic cuts, our income taxes are being raised all the time. Here’s how.

The U.S. uses a progressive tax system. The more money you make, the greater portion of it you must pay in taxes. Right now we’ve got five rates: 15%, 28%, 31%, 36%, and 39.6%. These rates are assigned to income brackets. For example, if you’re single and your taxable income is under $26,250, you pay 15% of that in tax. If your taxable income is above that, but under $63,550, you pay the 15 points on the $26,250 and 28% on the rest. (The remaining rates for single people kick in at $63,550, then $132,600, then $288,350, respectively.)

The good news is that you don’t have to pay your bracket’s rate on all your taxable income – just on the portion that falls within that bracket. The bad news is that it’s possible to get pushed into a higher bracket than last year, even though you’re making less money.

It’s called bracket creep. If you get a five percent raise in a year that inflation was 7%, you’re actually making two percent less money in terms of what you can buy with it. That’s because the cost of everything – food, gasoline, housing and so on – rose faster than your income. If the raise puts you into a higher bracket, you’ll pay more in taxes, even though you’re poorer than you were before. Every year, millions of Americans find themselves in this very condition, pushed into a higher bracket through no fault of their own.

This effect is cumulative. If over several years your income rises but inflation rises faster, your declining condition will nonetheless look like increasing wealth to Uncle Sam, who will push you into a higher bracket and take an even larger portion of your smaller stack of cash.

Most people fail to understand how this sneaky problem works. So they don’t find it the least bit strange when someone in government demands raising the minimum wage to keep up with inflation, then in the next breath argue against making a similar adjustment to taxes. For those bent on expanding government services, bracket creep is a wonderful thing: They get an increase in tax revenues every year without ever having to say those ugly words, "tax hike." It’s automatic, thanks to inflation.

Because no cut at all is the same as a tax hike, the only fair solution to taxpayers is to periodically lower the rates or raise the tax brackets to compensate for inflation. In other words, to cut taxes. Yes, some rich people will benefit from such an adjustment. But because everyone is in one bracket or another, all taxpayers benefit – including those who are rich only according to an out-of-date tax table.

Corporate Greed
Here’s another idea tax-cut critics love to blame on the rich: cutting corporate taxes. After all, don’t rich people own and run all the corporations? If we lower the tax on corporate profits, won’t they just pocket all the savings?

Sorry to disappoint, but it’s not that simple. Like every other cost of doing business, a corporation’s tax bill is passed on to its customers in higher prices, its employees in lower wages, or its shareholders in lower value. And who are those shareholders? Since about half of all Americans now own stock in some form, either directly or through a mutual fund or retirement plan, it’s us.

In the end, humans pay taxes, not corporate entities. Rich people who own lots of stock pay a large share of those corporate taxes, and will therefore benefit from a cut. But so will everyday consumers, employees and other investors. Including you and me. When critics of such a cut claim that it’s just a bonus to the rich, well … they’re lying to us.

Hand-Me-Down Money
Some of those rich folks have the nerve to believe that it’s OK to give money to their kids without the government stepping in and taking a big chunk. So they construct elaborate trusts and giving schemes to keep their estate out of Uncle Sam’s hands after the coffin is closed. Unfortunately, if they’ve got too much money or, what’s worse, they die before making these tricky hand-me-down arrangements, the government swoops in for its share of the estate.

A common excuse for leaving the estate tax in place is that the rich can afford to pay estate taxes. After all, they’re rich. One problem here. Dead people aren’t rich. They’re dead. And the dead don’t pay taxes. Their heirs pay the tax on the estate. Are the heirs rich? Maybe, maybe not. An estate tax doesn’t discriminate. If your eccentric Aunt Edna leaves you a fortune, it doesn’t matter whether you were previously a millionaire or living in your van: You’ll pay any estate taxes that are due. She’s now where the tax man can’t touch her.

To say that estate taxes are paid only by the rich is just plain untrue. The government doesn’t publish income records that would show where heirs of estates fall on the income scale, so there’s no way to know how much of this money is being passed on to the rich. Which means that any figure you see or hear that suggests otherwise is fiction. This also means that we’ve gone from accusing the rich of all known greed to charging formerly rich, currently dead people of this sin.

Big Money, Bigger Taxes
For eroding support of a tax cut, nothing is more effective than convincing people that such a cut will allow the rich to get away with paying less than their "fair share." Ironically, no argument is further from the truth than this one.

It’s true that the rich are most likely to benefit from a tax cut, but that’s because they already pay the lion’s share of taxes in this country. Indeed, they pay so much more than their fair share that it’s pretty hard to assemble a tax cut plan that doesn’t benefit them. Here’s some proof from the IRS records of the 1998 tax year, the most recent set of complete figures available:

The richest one percent of Americans made 18% of the income, yet paid nearly 35% of the income tax. To say it another way, a third of all the income tax paid that year came from people who paid nearly twice their "fair share." By the way, you were among them if your adjusted gross income (AGI) in 1998 was above about $269,000. I didn’t think so.

The richest five percent, with an AGI above $171,000, paid 54% of the income tax, yet made only a third of the money. And the richest 10 percent (AGI above $83,000), paid two thirds of the income tax, yet made 44% of the money.

No matter how you slice it, these rich folks pay way more than their fair share. Think of it this way: Everyone below the top 10 percent – that’s you and me and the vast majority of our fellow citizens – make over half the money in this country, yet we have to pay just a third of the income tax that funds our federal government. I’d call that a bargain.

A bargain, at least, if you’re not among the rich. If the wealthy – they’re the ones getting the short end of this deal – would like us to consider a fairer split, I don’t blame them.

Yet despite what you hear from the tax-cut critics, it’s not the rich doing most of the campaigning for such a cut. People in every tax bracket have good reason to want a tax plan that doesn’t exploit inflation – and leaders who don’t fiddle with the numbers to make it look like a tax cut is merely a prize to the rich when in fact it benefits us all.

Left Behind
I offer one more argument in defense of the poor rich people. If they’re so greedy and selfish and awful, wouldn’t we all be better off without them? What if all the wealthy people in our country suddenly disappeared – and their wealth disappeared with them? Call it a Rapture of the Rich. (Yes, I know, you can’t take it with you, but we’re playing pretend here, so just go with it.)

What would our world be like if we were left behind? Setting aside for a moment all the great beach houses, cars and corporate jets that would be free for the taking, how would America get along?

If just the richest five percent disappeared, the rest of us would instantly see a doubling of our tax bill. Then there’s the fact that pretty much everyone running a medium or large company in America would be missing. How many of these companies would survive? How many of us would lose our jobs, ability to buy food, access to medical treatment? And how would our government deal with what would surely be millions and millions of unemployed, hungry, uninsured people?

Before they left us, those rich people carried most of the burden of funding our government and providing jobs for us common folk. They endowed our schools, funded education grants and private scholarships – and paid the extra points on your low-interest student loan so you wouldn’t have to. They invested huge sums in medical research and the technology that runs our world. They donated billions to charity and gave us regular paychecks so that, together, the rest of us could give even more than that. What now?

I don’t know about you, but I miss them already. Can we please have them back? If a tax cut happens to benefit them too, so be it. They’ll spend that money, like the rest of us, on the things that keep our economy running.

The Social Question
As in last month’s column, I have focused here on economic issues. The rich have been unfairly accused of being the chief or only beneficiaries of tax cuts that in fact benefit the economy has a whole and every taxpayer in it.

But while the rich may be innocent of this charge, many among them are guilty of another, far more serious crime: loving money. It’s an age-old problem. The Bible overflows with examples of similar offenders and their actions: neglecting the poor, the sick, the homeless and fatherless. Browse through the case history and you’ll see that the one Judge who tried them all was not lenient in his sentencing.

Yet the rich hold no monopoly on this crime. While some of us are rightly disgusted by how the selfishly rich love their money, I suspect that most of us are offended merely because they have so much more of it to love than we do. But neither petty jealousy nor righteous indignation can justify us in manipulating the truth to take that money away from them.

Christians rich and poor are subject to a law higher than Uncle Sam’s. A law that upholds truth and mercy, justice as well as generosity. In theory, our tax law is shaped by God’s law, so these ideals may be found there too. But in practice we Christians too often use our grudging obedience to the former to excuse us from the latter, thus disobeying the spirit of both.

Next month we’ll set aside the tax discussion to look at that higher law – and the social consequences to all of us when it is ignored.