Until the coronavirus hit the economy was at full employment and wages were rising. Median household incomes had never been higher. If having a standard of living higher than 99.9% of the people who have ever lived is being treated like dogcrap then it has no meaning.
This could be the same justification the nobility used before the French Revolution – “you’re not living in caves any more, how dare you complain?”
It rings no less hollow here.
Top marginal tax rates were 28% when Reagan left office and are 37% now. That is an increase of almost 33%.
The reason capital income is taxed at a lower rate is that capital income is more elastic than wage income and thus the deadweight loss is much higher. Until the last tax reform the US had the second highest corporate income tax in the developed world because every smart country realizes that taxing capital is a bad idea.
Even with the lower taxes on capital the rich still pay much more than the poor.
Whether carried interest is investment or wage earnings is at least debatable, tips are obviously compensation and are treated as such.
Your history is as bad as your economics. Before the French Revolution there was a horrible economic climate due to awful harvests, inflation, and massive tax increases. Nothing at all like the great economy we had before coronavirus.
But they weren’t living in caves, eating bugs! What were they complaining about?
Just like how poor Americans, despite not being able to afford health care, safe housing, education for their kids, a safe neighborhood, etc… look at their cell phones! What could they possibly have to complain about?
What peculiar questions to ask. These numbers aren’t exactly secret. If you’re attempting to make an argument, JAQing typically doesn’t get the job done.
Until a month or so ago, Americans were overwhelmingly satisfied with their personal lives. Which makes sense, given aggregate economic indicators. Although those phones go a long way too.
I expect that number to drop now. After the last recession the Gallup number bottomed out at 78%. It was 90% in February.
Unfortunately Gallup was not using the same questionnaire in the 1780s.
Taxes were at 28% for like a year before Bush had to raise them again. The general trend has been down since probably JFK. Clinton raised them a bit but Bush pushed them down again. Obama raised them a bit and then Trump pushed them even further down. We are in a historically low tax rate environment and our pre-corona deficit is a direct result of that.
I’m not sure what you are talking. How are capital gains more elastic and how does that lead to more dead weight loss than any other tax?.
The typical argument for capital gains are:
Capital gains taxes gains that are accrued over several years, which would have been taxed at lower marginal rates if spread out over those years. This was never a very convincing argument because you always had the ability to sell your stock, recognize a gain and then repurchase it. It’s not like the LTCG holding period is 5 years, its 1 year.
Capital gains mitigates double taxation. This argument has been severely weakened after preferential qualified dividends taxation.
Capital gains can lead to taxation of inflation. That is an investment risk. If you don’t like it you can always buy bonds. They almost always pay higher than inflation at issuance. Why should the tax code subsidize your investment risks?
These are the three primary arguments that i am familiar with. I don’t think I’ve ever herd an elasticity argument unless it’s just a fancy way of saying one of the thre arguments above.
For decades corporate tax reform has always been about lowering the rate and broadening the base (by eliminating deductions so that more income would be subject to that lower rate). The most recent tax reform lowered the rate but did not really broaden the base. It was a pure give away.
The top marginal rate of corporate tax may have been very high but for almost any company that had the ability to forum shop, you could achieve comparable or lower real tax rates in America than you could in most of Europe.
Taxes always have deadweight losses. How is taxing capital any worse than taxing labor? Countries engaging in a race to the bottom to attract that capital is a bad idea.
And they make a lot more than the poor. I mean what’s your point? That the poor man should pay as much as the rich man?
Just because the rich pay more than the poor doesn’t mean the rich are paying enough.
It’s not really debatable. You are giving the hedge fund manager 20% of all the gains in the hedge fund. Call it a performance bonus if you like but it is compensation. As clearly as the gift you give to your server is compensation.
puddleglum compared $1 trillion in social welfare for the poor to $100 billion in corporate welfare for the rich.
Putting aside the notion that corporations and the wealthy need welfare, I was pointing out that there were other ways that they wealthy were getting paid off.
The real question that seems to be asked these days is whether we really need the 1%.
Not taxing something you could tax is not a pay-off. The rich still, on average, pay a higher rate than me. And I pay a higher rate than the poor. Thus our current set of tax laws do not, on average, benefit the rich over the poor.
That doesn’t mean we have an optimal setup for whatever you’re trying to optimize.
Just wanted to add this.
This should outrage people on principle.
But it’s also mostly irrelevant, because what produces the top 0.1% is not income at all, but wealth. As that link also says:
In most cases, and certainly in this one, focusing the argument on tax rates is a distraction, keeping you from looking at what’s hidden in the other hand. Wealth is the hidden factor. Wealth is, well, a billion times more important than income in determining power. Chris Rock once said, “Shaq is rich, but the white man who signs his check is wealthy.”
Let’s stop playing three-card monty and concentrate on reality. Wealth is not all-powerful, but it’s voice is a billion times louder than ours.
*If you deliberately ignore refundable tax credits.
So no, they don’t pay a lower tax rate.
That doesn’t mean they pay enough. Or that they pay as high a rate as they used to. But we can make that argument on its own merit, not by trying to manufacture outrage.
No, we should manufacture outrage (by let’s outsource production of that outrage to China).
Okay, bad joke. Sorry, aiming for low-hanging fruit levity. Won’t quit my day job.
For poor Americans healthcare is free, education is free, cell phones are free, and crime is down to levels not seen in 60 years.
In pre revolutionary France peasants were literally starving because of the bad harvests, and inflation, and almost all of them had seen their lifestyle deteriorate over the previous few years. There is nothing nearly happening in today’s America, you can relax mobs are not going to try to kill you and take your stuff.
Capital gains taxes have more elasticity because people can decide when to sell to realize a capital gain, but for the most part get paid for work on a regular basis. Thus they can time their selling to when it is most tax advantaged to do so , whereas they can’t time their work as easily.
Forum shopping is a deadweight loss. Capital has more deadweight loss than labor because if someone wants to take advantage of lower income taxes they have to move to the other country and become a citizen, whereas if they want to take advantage of lower capital taxes all they have to do is change where they make their investments. Having a corporate income tax much higher than other countries is what is the bad idea.
The point is that the rich are paying more than the poor. Glad you agree.
The debate is if an experienced restaurant manager opens a restaurant with two other people who have no experience in the managing a restaurant. They two partners agree that they will give money to open the business and the manager will run it. If they agree that each takes an equal share of the business profits, is the manager an employee or partner? That is what the debate is.
Everyone could be taxed more. If you count the refusal to increase taxes on a person as welfare, then the word ceases to mean anything. Welfare is money or services given by the government to help the poor. Corporate welfare is money given by the government to businesses.
If this thread and the other are going to speak of the 1%, or the 0.1% we should be clear what incomes those represent.
Here are income stats reported by the IRS for 2012 household adjusted gross income. If someone has more up-to-date figures, please post them. The first number is the minimum and the second number is average income within a bracket. Multiply by a million.
Top .001% $62 $161
Top 0.01% $12 $37
Top 0.10% $2.2 $7.5
Top 1.00% $0.44 $1.5
Top 2.00% $0.29 $0.9
Top 5.00% $0.18 $0.5
For example, it took $2,200,000 income to make it into the Top 0.1%, but the mean income of that group was $7,500,000. BTW, this group — the 136,000 households with highest incomes — had more total income than the bottom 50% — the 68,000,000 filing households with least income.
And of course, these are just reported incomes. They don’t include the huge sums which will be passed untaxed via estates or excludable gifts and trusts.
This oft-encountered meme is ill-conceived. The rich pay higher taxes than ever because their income is much higher than ever. Capische? And surely you can understand that tax cuts for the middle class, however small, are needed to keep the GOP base in line. (And don’t forget that regressive taxes on the working class — SocSec, sales tax, etc. — are not included in IRS figures.)
Yes, public schools are subsidized by taxes the rich pay. Would you prefer these funds be diverted to the private schools the rich use? BTW, unemployment benefits largely come from payroll taxes.
Elsewhere you complain that policing favors poor neighborhoods. Do you think that 911 calls from a rich neighborhood get a low priority?
The OP essentially asks whether the takers need the makers. Of course, unlike Mitt Romney I think the makers are the workers down in the trenches and the takers are the guys in the executive suite. And it is perfectly clear that the latter run the government. Maybe they get their way a bit more with the Republicans, but one that cost Hillary was the optics of her being in bed–not literally of course–with the money men.
I view this whole thing as a financial Chicxulub meteor. The question is who are the dinosaurs and who are the mammals and I don’t pretend to know the answer to that question. An awful lot, probably a majority of small businesses, restaurants, barber shops, …, are going to be out of business in a couple months. Millions of their employees will bankrupt, homeless, who knows what. Eventually all those vacated niches will get filled again, but by whom. Well people stop going to restaurants and resort to takeout only? Will our great symphony orchestras survive? Our museums? Are the mammals running about that are now mostly invisible but who will take over? Or will Amazon and the chain restaurants simply take over everything? I don’t know, but I expect life will change in ways we cannot now imagine.