You do realize that these numbers are not based in the law, but rather the socioeconomic situation of the country, right? I’d love to see 80% paying income taxes. You know why? It’d mean that 80% has jobs that pay enough to be worth taxing.
The ideal number would be zip, zero, nada, nobody paying income tax. I support the Fair Tax.
How does this not disproportionately affect people who must buy things regularly with a greater amount of their income?
For food, housing, transportation in any given area there is a benchmark for reasonable survival. The more you make from that point the less percentage of your income you must have to spend every day for those things. Why is a Fair Tax fair?
Well, there’s its a popular belief that people should pay for the amount of government the use; that is, if government makes someone’s life x dollars better, they should pay $x in taxes. Of course, calculating how much government improves someone’s life is the really difficult part, and you can argue against the first part too, I guess.
Just to be more clear not every deployment necessarily earns tax free status. It needs to be in a designated imminent danger zone. While it used to be any day in the month earned you the full extra pay (and tax free status) it’s now prorated based on days in that theater. Rarely do deployments line up with the tax year (especially now that it’s prorated instead of the whole month. Someone relatively senior without a lot of dependents could end up being a new taxpayer in both years affected by a deployment. Someone at a low pay grade and with lots of deductions could end up being effectively tax free for both years affected by a deployment.
Maybe we’re talking .1-.2 percent of the total population with the numbers dropping as combat deployments slow.
I’m for no income tax at all. Tax consumption. Necessities like groceries and things can go untaxed. The rich consume and buy way more, most people would have control overall their income and poor would not be taxed and could receive assistance in other ways. I also have a serious issue the tax issue. Because it’s so complicated, it’s easy to hide loop holes. Taxing consumption would place the burden of keeping up with that on fewer people (businesses) and maybe under these circumstances, the borderline retard arrangement at the IRS can make some sense and maybe sorta be helpful.
What kind of sick fucking country do we live in when we think one of our great social problems is not that people aren’t able to make enough money to pay taxes under our system, but that they should be that way and we should be crushing them with taxes anyway?
What kind of sick fucking political party declares a fucking nonsensical war on taxes, where they’ll oppose taxes in any circumstance, and support tax cuts in any circumstance, except when it comes to people who are too broke to fucking pay taxes? And one specific tax at that - they’re still paying a significant portion of what little money they have in more regressive, unavoidable taxes. Because of which is a big reason why we’re not taking income tax from them in the first place.
You have a group of people who think that the richest people who have ever lived are an oppressed class who desperately need tax relief so that they don’t fucking take a rocket to Mars to get escape the oppressive tax rates of Earth so that they can generously bestow jobs upon us as a kindness, and that taxes are an instrument of pure evil. And these same people who think that the poorest of that same society are “lucky duckies” because they don’t make enough income to pay federal income tax, and those people must be punished for it.
It’s not merely a matter of difference of opinion of running a society. It is actively evil. We are seeing the greatest transfer of wealth from everyone else into a tiny few - at an even greater disparity than the gilded age, a greater disparity than the economic insanity of the 1920s - reaching levels that you only see in banana republics. And the people who drive this modern feudalism have bought themselves a government and a grand network of slick propaganda that has convinced the common, every day people who they are actively fucking over to be their greatest advocates.
The very fact that “are we not taxing the poor enough?” can be a legitimate topic of conversation in the middle of the greatest upward wealth redistribution in history - where most people have not gained an inch of ground through decades of the richest economic expansion there has ever been because it was all funneled to a tiny few - is a shocking enough question. The fact that this is asked by people who feel that cutting taxes on the rich is a top priority should sicken any reasonable person.
The question seems confused. OP might want to study the concept of GINI coefficient. If GINI were extremely low, everyone would pay the same tax. If GINI were extremely high, 99% would pay no tax because they have no income.
A better question would be “What should the GINI coefficient be?” But you’d need an intelligent liberal message board to handle that question and this is not such a message board.
Moreover:
Yes. The right-wing meme that only the rich pay taxes is just an episode in How to Lie about Statistics. Buffett’s secretary really does pay a higher rate than he does; and Yes, her salary really is quite modest.
Uh… What? Okay, first off: while the rich do buy more, they don’t buy proportionally more, and far more can be spent on luxury. Think about it - when you’re poor, all of your income is spent on consumption - your house, your food, your car, gas, things you need just to get by. Savings? Good fucking luck. The rich, by comparison, don’t spend most of their income on essentials. Most of the difference can theoretically be made up by not buying luxuries.
You could argue that taxing income provides a similar incentive… But you’d be wrong, because at the end of the day, everyone needs money. If Bill O’Reilly quits his high-paying job due to income taxes, he’s still going to need an income. And if his new job pays less, then he’s not suddenly going to have more due to how taxation works. The idea that we’re “punishing success” is simply wrong.
However, by increasing taxes on consumption, what you do is either make it even more difficult for the poor to make do, or give the rich a reason to spend less. Neither is a good thing - we want people spending money. Your spending is my income, and vice versa.
As for the tax loophole issue… And it’s not like making the tax all about consumption solves this issue. People have been finding ways to evade their tax burden for quite a long time.
Nothing about a consumption tax or a flat tax makes any sense.
Because you keep 100% of your income. You get to decide what to spend it on. And as with any other sales tax, there will be exempted items, such as food, medicine, etc., which are the major components for reasonable survival.
Maybe the reason they “throw it out” is because the people who pay income taxes ALSO pay those very same taxes you are putting up for “tax”
It isn’t. The reason they throw it out is to paint a segment of the population as freeloaders don’t pay their fair share. When you look at the total tax burden vs. income these freeloaders pay a similar percentage to the extravagantly wealthy.
I’ll make no judgement as to what type of tax is required or needed (i believe that government should shrink), however the judgement that I will make is this: People who have no skin in the game don’t care much about what happens as long as the game doesn’t change for them.
I think everyone would like change. For some, it’s smaller government for others it’s larger, more voter turnout or a whole host of issues. For those who have no skin in the game, they just don’t care one way or the other.
Freeloaders is a seemingly apt term in this regard. Now whether or not they deserve to be called that is the argument.
The delineation of who gets to be a freeloader is at the heart of the argument.
When I hear the phrase “skin in the game” I immediately disregard the post. EVERYBODY has a stake. The poor pay proportionately much more of their income than the rich in taxes- be it income, gas, liquor, cigarettes, property, sales, whatever. There aren’t any “freeloaders”. Some people are for whatever reason unable to make it on their own and society has a safety net for this purpose. These “freeloaders” either have in the past or will in the future make positive contributions to society.
One could certainly argue that the rich use more government services than the poor. A poor person isn’t using the TSA, FAA, or government consulates. HE’s driving fewer miles on government roadways. He’s buying fewer foreign goods inspected by government employees. The list goes on and on.
Sure, the system is set up so that those who make below a certain threshold don’t pay federal income tax. Many are retired or not yet working. Many are working at piss poor jobs that don’t pay enough to justify a tax. To state piously that they have no “skin in the game” is absurd.
You seem to keep forgetting that even the 47% pay a fuckload in taxes already. They pay sales tax, property tax, cigarette tax, liquor tax, gas tax, energy tax, phone tax, every single tax that exists besides Federal Income Tax, at an identifiably higher percentage of their income than the wealthy. There’s plenty of skin there.
You are choosing to ignore the skin they’re already giving up because you want to call them freeloaders.
Consumption taxes don’t have to be flat. Most of them are VAT or sales taxes, but that’s not a law of nature. They can be designed differently.
It would take some administrative doing, but there is a possibility of a progressive consumption tax. The government could tax the lowest consumption levels at zero, and the highest consumption levels at rates in excess of 100%. Some economists favor this idea because consumption taxes are less distortionary and the progressive nature removes a lot of the sting at lower income levels.
I don’t believe such a tax could entirely replace an income tax, but it might make a dent and lead (over time, not immediately) to a stronger economy.
I would agree that “punishing success” is just an empty talking point. But that doesn’t mean that economics has stopped working.
People respond to incentives. Taxing income is a disincentive to the productive work that creates the income. “Everyone needs money” is not a counterargument, because these choices aren’t binary. There is a decision to make about working 35 hours and working 40 hours. There’s a decision to make about working 40 hours at this relatively easy job, or working 40 hours for more pay doing more strenuous work. The average person works less when their marginal dollar is taxed at a higher rate. That means less production in the economy.
A consumption tax would avoid that particular disincentive.
We want the flow of spending on new goods and services to be steadily increasing. We want people to spend money.
But that doesn’t mean we want them to consume. Consumption is not the entirety of the economy. There are other slices. Most important for this discussion is investment.
To simplify: Consumption is what we fritter away today. Investment is our production geared to the future. If we tax that which we fritter away in the present at a higher rate, it increases the incentive for more production geared for the future. Spending on investment works as someone else’s income just as well as spending on consumption. Consumption is the largest slice of the economy, so we wouldn’t want a massive increase in taxes with no transition time, but a slow revenue-neutral shift of some of the income tax burden into consumption taxes would be more economically efficient and would, over time, benefit the economy. All to the better if the consumption tax is implemented progressively.
Well,it’s not really 47%…
and:
Hey, what did we expect? Politicians aren’t known for parsing out subtleties. Or ironies, like the one bolded above.
If the forecasts are for stagnant or decreasing consumption due to a consumption tax, investment will increase why?
Especially at the top end it is easier to put off consumption than it is to forgo income - especially if we reduce the gap between income tax rates and capital gain tax rates. And that we assume that the top income tax rates are non-confiscatory, which is a fairly safe bet these days.
Tax laws are not complicated because income tax is inherently complicated. If you limit yourself to the standard deduction, have no capital gains, make no charitable contributions, don’t have a business, your 1040 could be done by a ten-year old in fifteen minutes.
Tax laws are complicated because we use them for other purposes. You think that wouldn’t happen with a consumption tax also? American-made product should be taxed less. Products made in enterprise zones should be taxed less. Products with good lobbyists should be taxed less. Green products should be taxed less.
No thanks.
Hellestall proposes a progressive consumption tax. That would seem to imply that government tracks your consumption. Perhaps you’d have to give your SSN at Target. Gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling, doesn’t it?
We could simplify the tax system easily today if we had the political will. I don’t think any of us will be holding our breath until that happens.
If you count taxes as skin in the game, I have lots. But I care about what happens a lot less than people more dependent on what the government does. If they cut food stamps I might get outraged, but it won’t affect my grocery trip. It will more likely affect the life of the person who pays no income taxes. Some of these people will have real skin in the game - skin and bones.