There isn’t unless you start taxing wealth. In which case you will destroy a bunch of wealth in the process.
I’m plenty educated on the subject. You seem very indignant that someone might have a different opinion.
Let’s have this conversation again after you’ve paid some heavy taxes.
In the discussion above you noted that this rate was lower than if a person only made $100k. So you are advocating for an even lower rate?
I’m curious: do you think there is anything particular to America that allowed you to make that $2 million. What I mean is, do you think you could have earned that anywhere, and it’s purely choice (or an accident of birth) that locates you in the U.S., or are there any characteristics of America’s economy, government, society, or other facet that made those earnings feasible?
This doesn’t actually appear to match the actual tax rates in effect. You’ll excuse me for not realizing that this was meant to be a factual account.
Does an effective 97% tax rate qualify for all or even most?
Nope, you’re not.
So hilarious to hear a bunch of poor people defend the wealthy as if they someday think they’ll be in the same strata as billionaires.
62 Billionaires possesses literally half the wealth in the world.
I promise you billionaires and corporations don’t care about you, why do you care about them? Take a look around sometime the cost of living keeps going up, but real wages are stagnant or even decreasing. When my Dad was in his twenties he was the sole provider and owned a house and two cars, and had two children, people now can’t even survive let alone thrive.
Poignant clip of Noam Chomsky discussing these very issues:
“Why tax the rich?”
“Because that’s where the money is.”
Uh, your cited article says that that estimated effective tax rate (which includes a wealth tax on inherited assets) would apply to the 400 richest individuals. No, that definitely does not qualify as taking away “all or even most of the money that rich people have”, even if it would take away most of the money belonging to that small subset of the richest individuals.
I definitely have never written a check for $500K in taxes, and I very much doubt that you have either.
However, a tax liability of $500K on an income of $2M corresponds to an effective tax rate of only about 25%. I have definitely paid tax at a higher rate than that, so I’ve actually paid heavier taxes as a proportion of income than this hypothetical taxpayer writing checks for $500K.
Anyway, if I had an income of $2M, I would be perfectly happy to write the government a tax check for 25% of that, or even 75% or more. I can get by just fine on an annual income of a “mere” few hundred thousand dollars, thanks.
As I said, I get it. Most people are fine to soak anyone who makes more than them.
A fair tax system would be dividing up the budget by the number of people and sending everyone a bill. Then people would get the government they are willing to pay for.
Anyway I’ll continue to whine about paying ridiculous sums to the government. Doing anything other than whining is pointless because I know that everyone else is on the other side of the table on this one.
A flat tax with a basic deduction for everyone and a cap seems pretty reasonable to me. Say a max of $100k in taxes.
So you’re OK with a law targeting 400 individuals out of a population of 327 million?
Also, a wealth tax would likely require a Constitutional Amendment, due to the issue of apportionment.
Good luck getting that passed.
Marginal utility has been experimentally verified. And if you ever have had money (I have) it is pretty fucking obvious.
Think of how much $100 is worth to a person who has nothing in the bank and is going to use it for food. Now think how much it is worth to someone with a couple of million bucks in the bank? It’s in the noise. Now think how much it is worth to Bill Gates.
The example I’ve heard is that the first ice cream cone or even the second on a summer day is worth a good bit - the 9th, not so much.
I’ve paid more in taxes than I made when I started to work at Bell Labs. I felt good about it, since it meant that I made a ton of money that year. I didn’t feel soaked in the least.
You do want to pay our soldiers, don’t you?
Ah, so giving the same bill to a guy flipping burgers for minimum wage and a billionaire makes sense to you? And are you absolutely sure that both these people get the same amount out of government?
They’be bought the myth that wealthy people are somehow smarter and more capable than they are, and if they just let the CEO’s run things one day they, too, will be billionaires.
That’s bullshit, of course. Billionaires have no incentive to add to their ranks.
While there are some benevolent wealthy people out there for the most part they only care about themselves and their families, which is why they use their wealth and influence to change the system to benefit themselves. Not you. Themselves.
Why should I care about a class of people that I will never be a part of, who aren’t even aware I exist?
We’ve been hearing about “trickle down” since Reagan was elected in 1980, but so far as I can tell that isn’t wealth trickling down it’s piss. The lot of the common man has NOT gotten better, if anything, it has gotten worse since the general public swallowed the notion that benefiting the wealthy would benefit everyone. It doesn’t. We’ve had 40 years of that and that is long enough.
I wonder if there is some equivalent to something like an “opposite marginal utility of money” that only affects wealthy people? Kind of like each extra dollar received inflates their ego a bit more and gives them a greater sense of entitlement and resentment.
Maybe a better question is why so much wealth consolidated with so few people?
How do they come up with that? From some quick Googling:
The total wealth of the Forbes 400 (wealthiest 400 people in America) is $2.7 trillion
Total wealth of all American households is $98 trillion.
That’s only like 3%.
These days the mainstream magazines are full of stories that lament the economic and social flaws of income inequality. But perhaps the real ‘income inequality problem’ is that incomes aren’t unequal enough!
Some say that the present U.S. GINI is unprecedented. Wrong! It was higher at the height of the Roaring Twenties boom — those years were called ‘Roaring’ for a reason. 14th-century Paris, just before the bubonic plague struck, had a GINI estimated at 0.7. The great New Spain Empire during the 18th century also had a GINI much higher than today’s U.S.
Like “P/E ratio” — which needs a 2nd parameter to be meaningful — GINI is misleading without a 2nd parameter. See, for example, this graph.
Even a flat tax, as you’ve defined it, might be unfair to the rich. I explained this in an earlier thread:
What if they charged everyone the same amount - and that meant that half of their customers couldn’t afford to eat there anymore?
Well, hard to come up with more a solid financial strategy than trying to replicate the 1920’s.