So then you'd be okay with cutting the income tax to 0 for black people and cutting the income tax in half for all other races? The different tax rates Santorum's proposing for different industries probably shouldn't even be legal under equal protection laws. What's moral, just or right about one business being discriminated against vs. another?
There’s a difference between a distinction of race, and treating different classes of business differently.
Did you know that businesses already get hit with different levels of taxation? Hotels have all sorts of taxes, phone companies pay a different set of taxes, airlines have different taxes, oil companies, car companies; there are different deductions, different taxes, different treatments for all sorts of things.
In the end, I wouldn’t think doing different tax rates would be all that workable, and a single tax rate is preferable; but there is a fundamental difference between a company engaged in manufacturing, and a company engaged in retail marketing.
The real problem is when we pick winners and losers — giving one company in an industry a tax break for doing what government wants, giving them a competitive advantage. A steel company isn’t competing with Target. So the steel company having a different tax rate isn’t really going to distort the market.
Like I said, I can’t imagine that a 0% tax rate for manufacturing could be opposed by conservatives. In the end, I can’t imagine too many conservative saying “Well, if we can’t give Walmart a 0% rate, we’d rather Alcoa pay 12.5% as well”.