Reviewing Paul Ryan's tax proposals - ever so popular with sensible conservatives everywhere - Wonks Anonymous is struck by the ongoing Republican obsession with removing all taxation from property income while increasing the taxation of income from labor. This from The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

The Roadmap would give the most affluent households a new round of very large, costly tax cuts by reducing income tax rates on high-income households; eliminating income taxes on capital gains, dividends, and interest; and abolishing the corporate income tax, the estate tax, and the alternative minimum tax. At the same time, the Ryan plan would raise taxes for most middle-income families, . . .

Wonks Anonymous has noted that another part of the changes - removal of the tax exemption on employer provided health insurance a work related benefit - would bring in over $1 trillion dollars in payroll taxes in the next decade.

Now Wonks Anonymous has been tempted to write this off as simple greed and class warfare but lately he has not been so sure.

He thinks that Republicans are closet Marxists. You see Marx thought that labor was the only source of value and that all the income of the propertied classes and of the state was surplus extracted from workers who were paid less than the full value of their output. If the state wants to extract surplus in Marx's world it had best go directly to the source, the workers and peasants who actually produce things.

Taxation of property income is inconvenient, indirect and inefficient. Furthermore it does nothing to increase the amount of surplus extracted from workers and does not help to further the prosperity of the propertied classes.

Of course payments for services delivered to workers or former workers also make little sense in this scheme. Why waste valuable surplus raising the living standard of working people?