# Democrats want to have a billionaire (non?)income tax

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/democrats-want-to-have-a-billionaire-non-income-tax/953260>\
**Category:** Politics & Elections\
**Created:** [October 27, 2021, 1:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/democrats-want-to-have-a-billionaire-non-income-tax/953260 "2021-10-27T01:27:13Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 23

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![DavidNRockies](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/davidnrockies/32/6279_2.png) [@DavidNRockies](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DavidNRockies)\
**Post date:** [October 27, 2021, 12:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/democrats-want-to-have-a-billionaire-non-income-tax/953260/23 "2021-10-27T12:43:13Z")

</div>

I’ve always found this topic fascinating. My take, after passively looking at it for years, is that we don’t have anywhere near enough information to make judgments about _discrete components of_ tax policy.

I basically set out why in this post, and in the thread containing it (that I started):

> [@Do the rich pay their fair share?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-the-rich-pay-their-fair-share/921817/101):
>
> For anybody still interested in this topic, I found another really fascinating page and set of charts: I’m going to endeavor to get each of the charts to display here. Buckle up wink[[image] ](https://www.mercatus.org/sites/default/files/d7/ADavies-capital-gains-rate-1-JPG.jpg)[[image] ](https://www.mercatus.org/sites/default/files/d7/ADavies-effective-corporate-rate-2-PDF.jpg)[[image] ](https://www.mercatus.org/sites/default/files/d7/ADavies-social-security-and-medicare-3-PDF.jpg)[[image] ](https://www.mercatus.org/sites/default/files/d7/ADavies-average-marginal-income-tax-rates-4-PDF_0.jpg)[[image] ](https://www.mercatus.org/sites/default/files/d7/ADavies-marginal-income-tax-rates-5-PDF.jpg) What’s my point ? Same as the point I made earlier: as a nation, we talk a whole lot abou…

I used to negotiate complex contracts for a living.

One cardinal rule was that you had to keep track of every single puzzle piece (and this was before consumer-level spreadsheets were democratized). Otherwise, many negotiations effectively played out as an expensive version of the car sales’ **[Four Squares](https://www.realcartips.com/cardealers/211-4-square-method.shtml)**.

Writ extremely large.

You were hammering away on one financial parameter. Meanwhile, they simply adjusted another – often not mentioning it, but burying it into the eventual multi-hundred page contract sent your way for signature.

It took extremely conscientious, eagle-eyed business people _and_ attorneys to catch these all-too-common “mistakes.” The penalty for failure to do so was significant.

Meaning: there are potentially thousands and thousands of tax-related knobs and levers to be manipulated, and we all focus on – because we only have visibility into – an extreme few.

That our system provides no material visibility into True Effective Tax Rates is a profound example of manipulation, but it’s surely not a ‘mistake.’

---

_[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/democrats-want-to-have-a-billionaire-non-income-tax/953260)._