I AM ABOUT to engage in class warfare. At least that’s what people who don’t like what I have to say will claim.

I can handle it. I just spent a week being called a Marxist, ostensibly because I think it’s OK for the government to let you take a bye on some of your taxes until you die, and then collect them, from your estate — but actually because I don’t think property taxes are un-American and, worse, I have this crazy notion that we shouldn’t make poor people pay twice as much of their income in taxes as wealthier people.

That larger issue, about the relationship between income and tax burden, is what leads to charges of class warfare.

Here’s the way the argument usually goes:

Bleeding-heart liberal: This tax plan hurts poor people because rich people make up 10 percent of the population, but they get 90 percent of the tax cut.

Free-market conservative: That’s just class warfare; the rich get most of the tax cut because they pay most of the taxes.

Often the free-market argument is right. If, say, the richest 10 percent of the population pays 90 percent of the taxes, then giving them 90 percent of the money from a tax cut simply maintains the status quo. And if the people who make 90 percent of the money are paying 90 percent of the taxes, liberals ought to applaud the status quo.

But when it comes to the plans the Legislature is mulling to swap property taxes for a higher sales tax, the bleeding-heart liberal argument is the one that’s right.

The “bleeding-heart liberal” argument is so clearly and indisputably correct in this case that liberals aren’t even getting a chance to make it. When House Speaker Bobby Harrell tried to dismiss it recently by saying how “disappointed” he was that anyone “would pull class warfare into their effort to stop people from getting property tax relief,” he was attacking the embodiment of free-market conservatism: the S.C. Chamber of Commerce.

There are three elements that make the property tax swap unfair: The tax cut benefits the wealthy most; the tax increase hits the poor the hardest; and those changes would be layered atop a system that already asks proportionately less of the wealthy than the working class.

When The Post and Courier examined whom a property tax cut would benefit, it found that under the House plan to eliminate all residential property taxes, “for every dollar in tax relief that goes to the owner of a $100,000 home in Charleston, the owner of a $1 million home would get $21” — more than double what you’d expect for a house that costs 10 times as much. Under the Senate plan to eliminate only school taxes, “the difference in dollar savings between the $1 million home and the $100,000 home is nearly 46 to 1.”

Those who cry “class warfare” will accurately point out that the owners of the $1 million houses are paying that much more than the owners of $100,000 houses now. That’s because a 1995 law sharply reduced school property taxes on the first $100,000 of a home’s value, and because seniors don’t pay any taxes on the first $50,000 of their homes’ value.

So it does seem misleading to suggest that the tax swap would hurt poorer South Carolinians. After all, poorer people already get a tax break that benefits them more than wealthier people; creating a new tax break that benefits wealthier people more would seem to balance things out.

That would be true if 1) we had a flat or progressive overall tax system to start with and 2) we were replacing the property taxes with a flat or progressive tax.

Neither is the case.

As Clemson economist Holley Ulbrich explains in a report for the Palmetto Institute, even with the property tax breaks skewed toward lower-income homeowners, South Carolina’s overall tax system still is regressive: The poorest fifth of households in South Carolina spend 7.9 percent of their income on state and local taxes, while the very richest spend just 5.5 percent of their income on state and local taxes. And that doesn’t count fees, which South Carolina relies on more heavily than other states and which tend, Dr. Ulbrich writes, to be regressive.

Compounding the problem, the property tax savings for the wealthy would be paid for through a higher sales tax, which is the most regressive of the major taxes states collect. Lawmakers do propose to exempt groceries from taxation, which takes a lot of the regressivity out of the sales tax; but even with that change, poor people still would spend more of their income on taxable goods than wealthier people.

You can call this class warfare — just as the libertarians can call property taxes unconstitutional and claim that everybody agrees. It doesn’t make it true. And it doesn’t make it moral for our legislators to require the poor — who already are paying more than their fair share — to pay for a tax break for the better-off.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.