Thanks for the link, but as interesting as it is, it doesn’t go to my question. You want “the rich” to pay more? Fine, let’s say it’s a great idea. But you still haven’t told me what constitutes “rich”. Why is this so difficult? I’m asking you for your opinion on an issue that you evidently feel very strongly about.
And by the way, the most troubling part about all those graphs was the tax rates back in 1960. Disgusting and immoral.
I don’t think it is unreasonable in the least. And if the rate was the same across the board, they would be doing just that—if they make five times as much as you, they pay five times the taxes. The major problem for me is the shrinking tax base. The more you shrink it, the fewer and fewer people you have paying in. And when they’re is a minority who pay, then, hey, why not just tax them more? And more? And more? Eventually you have a confiscatory socialism-like relationship between the state and those most productive. And soon after they will cease being so productive. I’m all for increasing revenues through closing loopholes so the rich pay what they should. I’m also much more flexible on the estate tax, as it’s not money you made by the sweat of your brow.
Semantics, the last refuge for the bankrupt argument.
No, eventually we tax them into the poorhouse where they develop exotic diseases that spread to the general population, turning the middle class into man-eating zombies that roam the streets, making life unsafe for everyone who isn’t armed… but since Obama is taking away everyone’s guns, the American people will be completely defenseless against this zombie horde, and it will result in the end of the planet.
THAT’S why we shouldn’t tax the rich.
Magellan01 - something to reconsider is make sure that you look at the effective tax rates, not just the bracket raw number. Those do a better job of showing what people are actually paying in total Federal taxes against their total income.
Back the 1960s, for example, you had different multi-generational trust laws. You could set up a multi-generation trust to take care of your descendants. Trusts like that are not nearly as available now.
The CBO has published historical effective tax rates, but I only found numbers since 1979. Brookings re-published them in a decent format:
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=456
Here is the Top 1%:
1979: 37.0
1980: 34.6
1981: 31.8
1982: 27.7
1983: 27.7
1984: 28.2
1985: 27.0
1986: 25.5
1987: 31.2
1988: 29.7
1989: 28.9
1990: 28.8
1991: 29.9
1992: 30.6
1993: 34.5
1994: 35.8
1995: 36.1
1996: 36.0
1997: 34.9
1998: 33.4
1999: 33.5
2000: 33.0
2001: 32.8
2002: 32.8
2003: 31.7
2004: 31.4
2005: 31.6
2006: 31.3
2007: 29.5
True. But you left out the middle step. The one in which people lose the ability to argue points in a logical fashion and simply resort to sarcasm. That’s the thing to look out for.
Except people who make more money can afford tax attorneys to find ways to reduce their tax burden, whereas the “poor” cannot (nor do they possess access to as many tax reducing vehicles as the rich). See Buffet and how he paid the lowest tax burden out of anyone in his office. So all a flat tax would do would increase taxation on the “poorer” side of the equation and do fuckall to the richer side.
And we’ve already discussed how everyone pays taxes (if not always federal income taxes) elsewhere in this thread, although you can’t be faulted for missing it in this ongoing trainwreck of a thread. Suffice it to say, though, everyone except for the truest, truest, most homelessiest of the poor pays for part of the system.
A flat tax is a pipe dream, in other words. You can say it looks great on paper – and indeed it does – but so do unicorns. A flat tax would be to fairness what George W. Bush is to intellectual curiosity. So the only recourse, as far as I see it, is to weight the equation in favor of the poorer, and hope that the situation works toward fairness in the end. And we’re not there yet – again, see Buffet’s article about his tax burden relative to his coworkers.
Agreed. But one thing that is striking from the link is how the effective tax rate went negative for the first quintile and then the second. I think we all have a responsibility to contribute to the general welfare fund. When one person has to spend some part of his work week for money he has to hand over to the government, it seems to me that the moral thing is that everyone do it. Or as close to everyone as we can get. Just over 50% doesn’t cut it.
I think we can agree that loopholes should be closed. One of the nice things about a flat tax is that you pay your X% on your income and that’s the end of it. No tax attorneys necessary.
“We need to argue in a logical fashion!” says the guy who argues that taxation is a slippery slope that will lead to the rich no longer working.
Tell me you aren’t that stupid to be saying that without a trace of irony.
It’s actually $370,000 where you’d get a 1% overall tax increase, if I’m doing my math correctly, if we were to assume the top bracket started at $250,000. You could argue that $370,000 isn’t rich (getting a little silly now) but then they’re only suffering a 1% increase in taxes anyway. I realize in your view that this means they’ll close up shop and become squatters and never contribute anything to society again, but come the fuck on. $750,000 is the point at which taxes increase 2%.
There are actually rich people, right? I mean you guys act like every fucking person in the country is just barely making it and if we tax them literally 1% or 2% more that then it’s the same thing as if we took 99% and our economy will collapse just like the Soviet Union we seek to emulate! You’re fucking hysterical shrieking harpies, advocating for people who could buy your entire life without feeling it.
The thing about raising the top marginal rate is that the only people that will really feel it at all are the ones that are very rich. It doesn’t affect anyone who makes just at the top marginal rate. It barely affects people that make 10-20% more than the top marginal rate. The ones who see a noticible tax increase are the ones making several times the top marginal rate, but even then, we’re talking about increasng their overall burdens by 1-3%, which is hardly confiscatory.
The funny thing is that I used to be someone who stood up to the people who were basically just engaging in class warfare and advocated taxing the rich punitiively. I don’t think people should be taxed just because they’re rich. But people like you - who are so fucking taken in by the propoganda of the super rich, who buy the republican talking points so throughly, have made that too bitter a position to even defend. The idea that the wealthiest people in the world, who have millions of times what the average person has, are this oppressed class, and that increasing the burden to them to maintain the society that has allowed them to become so rich by 1 or 2 or even 3% as somehow making them victims, and that the lesser injustice would be instead to cut off vital services for people with only millionths of what they have, is so fucking mind boggling, so disgustingly evil, that I can’t even understand it.
To be clear, I can understand the principled stand for smaller goverment that requires less taxes. What I can’t understand is the idea of the super rich as oppressed and victimized. To believe that, you have to either be super rich yourself and worried about your self interests, to believe one day that you will be one of the super rich and dream about stomping all over the rest of society (I do believe this makes up a significant portion of the people who advocate for the rich - they believe that one day someone will recognize how great they are and somehow they’ll become rock star bank investors who invented flying cars or something, so they advocate for the rich crushing society so that one day they can be amongst the crushers), or you have to have bought in to the rather ridiculous propoganda that the super rich are putting out. I feel as though if you guys could just step back for a second, with a clear mind, you’d realize “What the fuck was I thinking?”
This “irony” of which you speak…?
Well, a millionaire is someone whose assets are worth > 1,000,000.
Really, although they are technically different, I have less of a problem taxing people whose annual incomes are > $250,000 more (on the margin) than I do taxing people whose holdings are worth > $1,000,000.
So the argument doesn’t ‘shift’ to Obama’s favor - millionaire is a lazy term that works against him, in my view.
This is wrong. The complicated part of figuring out taxes comes from what’s considered income, what can be deducted, etc. Once you come up with a number - once you’ve determined that someone’s taxable income is $123,456, then applying the marginal tax rates to that takes 20 seconds and a calculator. The flat tax saves you that 20 seconds, not all of the tax lawyering to figure out your taxable income.
“But if we’re reforming the tax system, we can take out all of those deductions and make it simpler” you say. Well, that’s not relevant here - there’s nothing special about a flat tax that would allow that. We could reform the system to be far simpler and still use progressive taxation, or we could use the current complex system and then just apply a flat tax to the taxable income number we come up with at the end. Tax code simplicity and flat taxes are unrelated, and one wouldn’t lead to the other.
The only reason for advocating for a flat tax is that it appeals to people who don’t understand that the system we have now actually is remarkably flat when you take into account the total tax burden. Everyone from the poorest to the richest pays around 18-20% of their total income in taxes in their various forms. The real issue is that the rich want to pay less taxes than everyone else, and the flat tax idea is great propoganda because it seems so intuitive and fair if you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.
Well said, SenorBeef. Additionally, I would add that, while tax deductions are often referred to as “loopholes,” that’s not really an accurate term. A loophole implies that there was some sort of Congressional fuckup, some murky legislative language, the equivalent of forgetting to put “limit one per customer” on a free pretzel coupon. That’s not it at all. Deductions are in the tax code for a reason. To incentivize desirable behavior, as a result of political negotiations, to make a compromise more palatable or balanced, as pork, specifically as a vehicle to reduce the tax burden for a group of people, etc. I don’t think anyone could possibly predict the consequences – direct or unintended – of simply making them all vanish. The CBO could take a year to analyze it in detail and still miss a large part of the effects. Not to mention that, if confronted with the stark reality of the situation, no one would want all deductions to go away; they just want the nonsense deductions (read: those that don’t affect them) to go away.
And with deductions still in place, a flat tax is bullshit, a way to save 20 seconds, as SB put it. And no one will ever get rid of all deductions, so, like I said, a flat tax is a pipe dream.
Negative on INCOME TAX, not on the total effective tax (which includes FICA). That negative portion is probably the EITC, something that at one point even conservatives (like Reagan) supported. EITC is there to encourage people to work, rather than take welfare and cash under the table. By collecting a legit paycheck and filing, they can qualify for more money.
Well said. My deductions / credits:
Two kids
Solar system
Window tinting (another energy credit)
Mortgage interest
Medical expenses (through flex spend)
Child care expenses (through flex spend)
Charitable donations in money, mileage and value of goods
Home office
“Business” expenses for consulting fees (any money we earn on the side we write off against a portion of cell phone, internet, etc.)
Shouldn’t *everyone *get that?
Everyone is eligible if they spend money on a personal system (or they were in 2011 for 2010 taxes - not sure what it is now).
I was just listing my deductions / credits, each one a special interest related loophole. You could ask WHY should I get to claim solar credits. After all, with a system that costs $25k, this credit is only available to the middle class and above.
Just about every deduction can be justified by someone.
Oh. You have to have a *personal *solar system.