Uh, okay. So if they’re not benefiting the same, is one benefiting 10 times more? 20? 30?
Is there a threshold for benefiting? Under $30k you don’t benefit so you don’t have to contribute?
The justification for a progressive tax requires stating why a person making $500k is getting 10 times the benefit as a person making $50k. Sarcasm just isn’t going to cut it.
So far this thread consists of throwing everything against the wall and hoping something sticks. Try using your words. Tell us how income is an effective measure of how much someone benefits from society.
ETA What I think this thread has shown is that income tax is a piss poor way to set up a system, and business tax would be much more appropriate. Look at all the examples: roads, ports, educated society. All point to costs and benefits for business, which should be taxed.
To point out that just because you’re saving that money, doesn’t mean you’re getting no use out if it. And to point out that the poor don’t even have the ability to save that money in case of a rainy day or apocalypse.
The rich have more to lose in absolute figures, but if everything goes to 0 (or close to it) we’re all screwed.
To point out the oddness of complaining about taxes when there are common-sense ways of going about reducing your burden.
I’ll buy that. It is an argument from fairness. But as I’ve pointed out a few times earlier, most of those other taxes one can opt out of or curtail. so, I don’t see why policy of a tax you MUST pay should take those into account. We must work to live. That labor generates income. That income will be taxed. How the money is taken should be based on a fairness of that very system.
I don’t see why it would be more. They had subsistence, they now have nothing. The rich had plenty (in the land of plenty sense) they now have nothing. I personally feel the rich lost more. You’re free to disagree, of course.
If taxation kept meteors away, I’d be all for a meteor tax.
If you’re not already, yes. This wasn’t meant to be a major proportion of my point, but I did think the reference to post-tax saving was odd. I use as many pre-tax savings options as I can. It only seems logical.
If we can build a strong case for a flat tax being fairer than a progressive income tax, then yes, we should consider it. I don’t think you’ve met that burden yet, and I don’t think anyone is likely to within the constraints of this thread. Such a case would, at a minimum, have to be far more comprehensive and complicated than anyone here is going to post, or probably even read.
And that would be a lot of effort to go to, since we haven’t even agreed what sort of fairness we’re trying to implement yet.
Well, I certainly don’t see how a progressive tax beats a flat tax out on fairness grounds. This thread has numerous arguments from fairness for a flat tax, and just that one you offered for a progressive tax. I admit that fairness is not the only consideration and that another tax scheme might be better overall. But when measuring the attribute of fairness alone, a progressive tax doesn’t come close.
Not logical at all if society goes to shit and government collapses. You need that in gold, and firewood, both bought with after tax income.
And the reason I mentioned after tax income was to point out that my apocalypse savings come from after tax income, so my real income is a lot smaller.
Oh, I agree wholeheartedly. But I see just the one argument you provided (which, as I pointed out, I think can be largely discounted) and several strong ones on the flat tax side. The strongest I think having to do with the amount of time we work for yourselves and the government. Hell, the more productive person actually gets penalized for being more productive in a progressive system.
Okay, so we have a system that is fairer than what we have now. If it can from a practical standpoint be shown to be able to generate the same dollars for the government, is it worth looking at?
I believe you misunderstand me. It is indeed my understanding that there is no clinching argument for a progressive tax: there are plenty of decent arguments on both sides though. By way of contrast, I think there are clinching arguments against a poll tax: the Benefits Principle applies here. There are clinching arguments against some variants of moral relativism and moral nihilism, IIRC. I maintain that reason can be usefully brought to bear on questions of moral philosophy; it’s just that it can’t rule out quite as much as we might like.
Magellan01:
----- Now, I notice you left out “worked harder”.
Oh yeah: in case I wasn’t clear, I initially put forth a weak argument that nonetheless would be ok if we ignored effort and incentives. The point of that is to highlight that the conservative argument turns on those issues. But surely there are other considerations: if transferring funds from Bill Gates to someone who suffers from, say fistula alleviates net suffering in the world (as it would [1]) then surely there’s a moral case for doing so, even coercibly. (I’m not claiming the moral case here, I’m claiming that a reasonable moral consideration exists. There are others. FTR, I believe that advancing economic growth and opportunity are also moral goods, as is due process etc.)
-----------Leaving the fantastic examples out of it, individuals do better—and benefits more—when people align their talents with a job. The work product is better, and that improves our society. The reward they can receive is greater, and that improves their lot in life and increases the amount that person will contribute to the public coffers. So, society should encourage people to be as productive as possible in that same 28 hours.
You’ve wandered a bit. A 95% tax wouldn’t necessarily cause Bill Gates to switch to dish-washing: more likely he would simply retire and take up philanthropy. (wink). More seriously, you’re wandering into issues that are empirical: how individuals respond to tax rates is something that can be measured: it may be a matter of data interpretation to some extent, but it shouldn’t be a question of principle, logic or intuition.
Incidentally, there are rights-based approaches that have ultra-liberal implications. I’m thinking of the work of the late John Rawls. My personal leanings tend to be negative utilitarian: set policy so as to minimize suffering. But that’s a preference [2]: again, I frankly wish there was a clincher for a progressive income tax (like I believe there is against relying solely on a poll tax) but I don’t know of one. IME, budding liberal moral philosophers who wish to construct such an argument will have to grapple with interpersonal utility comparisons.
[1] I stacked the argument. A $1000 operation in this example can substantially alleviate literally a lifetime of misery and social ostracism. This is an extreme case of course, but it illustrates the principle.
We haven’t defined “fairer” yet, either. Until we set that standard, no one can say which tax system best meets it.
Lets’s go back to my original argument, that a high income earner is taxed proportionally more because he uses proportionally more services in the course of earning and protecting that income. If you look hard enough, maybe you can find someone who makes a fortune without any use of broadcast media, trademark protections, and all the other things I posted last night. I’ll bet there are a lot more high earners who do use those things. If they get more, it’s fair to institute a system in which they pay more.
While I don’t buy the use argument, as that should be handled by business taxes, we AGREE that the wealthier should pay more. But why isn’t, as per my example, ten time more(!) enough? What is? Why? What fairness principle is being applied to your numbers.
And I agree that fairness is one attribute. There’s effectiveness, practicality, efficiency, etc.
So should business taxes be progressive? (Conservatives are already trying to lower taxes on the wealthy in the name of spurring them to create jobs; I can’t see a progressive business tax going over any better with them than a progressive income tax.)
Why draw a distinction between taxes on a business and taxes on a person who derives his income from owning and running that business? (And you’re the one who introduced the type of business into this thread, why do you now want to make that irrelevant to the subject of income tax?)
Because some services scale linearly with income (one guy has one truckload of produce delivered to his restaurant, the other guy gets ten truckloads; he’s using the roads ten times as much in the process of earning his income) and others don’t. All the things I listed in my earlier post are services that a large business is likely to use, and the small business doesn’t use at all. Add those services together, and the high earner should pay not only ten times as much, but a little extra on top of that.
To me it all boils down to this question: do you think it’s fair that in the absence of a progressive tax (or some equivalent form of redistribution) that the rich/poor gap steadily widens? Even if you ignore the fact that some economic instrument must somehow create economic equilibrium in order to avoid eventual revolution once the gap becomes too wide, it seems to me that the economic ‘feature’ of wealth gap runaway is clear and unimpeachable evidence of the innate unfairness of economic starting points. It’s obvious on an intuitive level that wealth creates power – which is another way of saying the playing field is not level. But wealth gap considerations bring quantitative evidence of it. Any discussion of the ‘fairness’ of a progressive tax or any redistributive system must include a discussion of how the ‘unfairness’ of the tax itself is balanced by the ‘unfairness’ of the playing field in which the money that is being taxed was made. It’s not simple.
Again, you’re making the same mistake. We don’t tax based on side, we tax on their profitability. Profitability has nothing to do with size. I agree that a large company that uses more resources should pay more taxes.
And I showed all kinds of examples where two people can use the same resources but earn a different salary.
So what do you want? Tax based resource use, or tax based on income/profitability? Like I said, there are lots of extremely large companies that use shit loads of resources, but aren’t as profitable as a small desirable business (or person).
So, taking all of a kid’s $5 allowance is the same as taking $5 from your wallet? They are equal contributions after all. And I’m not quite getting that you understand the concept of marginal utility based on what you said.
I’m responding in order, so I’m glad to see you admit the post I just responded to was in error. However, this doesn’t address the equal pain principle. If working 4 months for the government caused the low income worker to starve while the high income worker never feels it, is this okay with you. Try imagining the low income worker as a hard worker with low intelligence, and thus sentenced to low income jobs because his mother drank. Perhaps this guy would never, ever think of going on welfare. Still think taxes should be exactly proportional?
You don’t think so? Big companies can have bad years, and even lose money sometimes, but I’d expect to find a correlation between size and profitability.
And I’d expect the correlation to be even stronger when we’re talking about personal income. Even in a year when GM loses money, I’ll bet the CEO takes home more money than a self-employed plumber who has a great year.