Joe Biden just said the standard deduction should be $30,000 per year per person. OK, that's not what he said directly, but it is what he meant when he said, "If you work for less than $15 an hour and work 40 hours a week, you're living in poverty."

Well, compared to someone who has lived on a public salary for most of his life since 1973, or the father of a Ukrainian gas magnate, perhaps that is poor. To the rest of the world, that's in the top 5% of all global incomes.

It's also true that two people making up a household working on that $15 an hour, working full time, would be making $60,000 per year — only a shade under the median household income of $63,000 for the entire country. Living in the top 5% of the world and living around the average for the country? That's not really a good definition of poverty, is it? But people in politics do tend to be a little out of touch with reality, especially about money.

Look at the tax implications of Biden's minimum wage proposal. Biden is in favor of taxing the rich, not the poor. We don't need to be Democrats to believe in that. It's only fair, right? After all, government has to be paid for, so let those with the broadest shoulders bear the weight. Plus, it's true that a lot of the government's spending goes toward alleviating poverty, so we would do well not to be causing any poverty by the taxation we do.

Then, there's the moral case for a minimum wage, which suggests that it represents the minimum that someone's labor is worth. If that's so, then why should Uncle Sam get a cut of that minimum?

All three of these reasons collide into an unanswerable argument that the standard deduction should be whatever the minimum wage is. For people earning below that minimum amount are the poor, as we have already been told, and who wants to tax the poor to pay for society?

This has the effect that we will, finally, start starving the beast. Top-end income tax rates are already pushing over the peak of the Laffer curve, meaning that trying to increase rates will just lower revenues. That means that a moral and progressive income tax system raises less cash than the current one, and therefore, less government can be bought.

It might sound a little utopian that the standard deduction should nearly triple from where it is now in order to match the proposed minimum wage rate. It might sound unattainable even, except the case has been made elsewhere and won.

In my native Britain, I started some 15 years ago to point out that the personal allowance (the standard deduction) should be the same as the minimum wage for all the reasons given above. Sure, it took a couple of turns of the electoral cycle, but that personal allowance has nearly tripled over that time. If we decide there is some moral minimum someone should be paid for his or her work, then the rest of us don't get to take some of his or her money to pay for our government.

In sum, the argument goes: We shouldn't rest the cost of government upon the backs of the poor. The tax system should start to bite only after a household has escaped poverty. The standard deduction should be whatever the annual income of a minimum wage worker is because someone earning the minimum wage shouldn't be paying income tax.

Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at the Continental Telegraph.