Taxation for Representation
A week and a half ago, Jon Robin Baitz laid out in a Huffington Post article a number of suggestions for building an infrastructure for the arts at this propitious economic moment. There’s a lot to chew on in Baitz’s prescription, but one item in particular caught my attention:
I would attempt to pass legislation on a special tax dedicated to the NEA for all artists who make over half a million dollars a year from their work.
Half a million dollars a year is a lot of money; anyone making this kind of scratch is sitting pretty far up in even the highest federal income tax bracket. I doubt that such a special arts surtax, if implemented, would be overly burdensome or jeopardize standards of living for the taxed elite. I also doubt that this is the kind of tax a high-grossing artist would be loath to pay—supporting the arts is a social good that most artists can be relied upon to defend, and Baitz’s tax would give those who have the money an opportunity to put it where their mouths are. The whole thing would acquire an aura of pleasant symmetry, however, if the artists so taxed were in return given a new kind of representation; another of Baitz’s suggestions resonates quite well with this possibility:
I would present a series of lectures for senators and congressional leaders in Washington (open to the public) on the subject of the arts and their importance. It would feature speakers from the arts who had achieved master-status. I would transform the Kennedy Center Honors into the “American Masters Program.”
This could be really golden, I think. We often talk in contemporary music about cultivating new and larger audiences, but what if we had an audience that could make laws? Not only could the case for greater public support for the arts be made directly to the people who decide such things, but the content we advocate could be exposed to them as well. I would humbly submit that it might do senate and congressional leaders of all political persuasions some good to encounter Ives, Cage, and Feldman, quintessential Americans all, and this would be the perfect chance.
