Personally, I’d say one that added up to more than 50% in total - as in, the top tax rate, whatever it is, should never be such that the govt takes more than, in the words of E. Murphy: “HALF!”. That’s what I think is fair - half of everyone’s shit.
Of course, I say this as someone who has to pay a top-end tax rate of 40% (only ever made that one year, though), so I may have a higher tolerance than Americans. And I do live in a developing economy so I don’t enjoy the range of services of someone in a G8 country, and for that, 40% seems fair to me. However, the OP was phrased as an American example, what with its dollars, and half is what I’d personally be willing to pay as fair in a modern Western democracy like the US, Canada, UK. Hell, for Denmark or Sweden, I’d *personally *pay even more - say, up to 60% total on the really big (>$100 million) incomes. But I could see how others might see that as a bit much.
Are you, perhaps, familiar with the term ‘kill the goose that lays the golden egg’? Just curious…
Depends on how one defines ‘fair’. Fair to Bob? Fair to me? Fair to you? Fair to some liberal itching to soak Bob for everything they can get away with?
This is a very good question. What we see in our public discourse is a debate over who should pay for our government spending, who should feel a heavier burden in tax rates which contributes to class warfare which further divides us as a people. And obviously tinkering with the tax code will not fix our budget problems. Any thinking person should realize:
We Need To Cut Federal Spending Significantly.
The truth of the matter is this: Taxes are increasing for everyone. But through political manuvering and the complexity of the tax code, or slightly shifting the burden from one group of Americans to the next, this fact can be obscured. Then everyone feels that some other group of Americans are not paying their fair share. But we are all on the hook for the national debt and everyone feels the effects of inflation in eroding our standard of living. Unless our focus is on cutting spending and balancing the budget, we will continually be distracted discussing tax code minutiae.
Some feel that a signficant portion of the rich in this country (such as bankers, wall street firms and international corporations) are not playing by the rules, get special benefits from government and therefore should pay more in taxes. This is the wrong approach. We should focus on cutting spending by eliminating corporate welfare and subsidies. Then we should take back our government from the banks and corporations and prosecute fraud and abuse and eliminate the notion of too big to fail. We should reestablish the principles of Capitalism and Free Markets (not Corporatism as we have today) where all business plays on an equal footing and the government is impartial and not involved in regulating the marketplace. I don’t believe we should punish people just because they are rich. And the truth is, when you establish a very high tax rate on big business, they simply lay off workers and pass on the cost to the consumer by way of higher prices on products and services.
The Free Market generates prosperity for all Americans. It is the only system in the world which generates a healthy vibrant middle class and eliminates poverty. Any system of Authoritarian government in collusion with big business (all big government lends itself to benefit a privaledged class) becomes parasitic on the productive capacities of its citizens and creates conditions where the wealth gravitates towards a few at the expense of the many. The middle class gets wiped out and then there is only the obscenely wealthy and the very poor. This was the standard in most nations before the United States came into existance and is still the norm throughout the world. If we want to return to the progressive egalitarian nation we used to be, we would cut spending drastically starting with corporate welfare and subsidies and defense spending followed by true entitlement reform. Then we would deregulate the market and establish again a system of free enterprise and a free economy based on savings and production rather than debt and interest payments that make bankers rich.
I know I didn’t exactly answer the question. But basically I believe everyone should pay less taxes including the rich. Our focus should not be on tax rates, it should be on balancing the budget. We should cut spending then we can afford to cut taxes. Think about this a little. We should reject corporatism and embrace a free economy. If we did, the gap between rich and poor would shrink, our prosperity would shoot through the roof and we would all be a lot happier.
Poor Joe and his family (and the employees and families of the other 200 people who Bob’s capital employs) when they lose their jobs. So sad for them but you managed to squeeze Bob for some extra cash…well, before he either sheltered it somewhere else or moved somewhere else. So sad for you that Bob and his capital aren’t available anymore, but I’m sure you feel really good about how you’ve leveled the playing field, right? That goose tastes good, ehe? Who needs gold…
But he doesn’t have to justify his millions, he earned it. You have to justify taking the money he earned away from him. A great way to look at the moral component is to look at the percentage of days one has to work for themselves and what percent he has to work for the government.If the tax rate is 33%, one has to work the first four months of the year for the government. Why should Person A have to work a greater portion of their time for an entity other than themselves. Hell, there’s more logic to allowing him to work less time for the government, as long as he paid in more than someone else.
What capital is this again? Sure he is not bidding up pieces of subprime mortgages and contributing to the bubble? Perhaps he is buying T-bills and enabling big, bad government. I suspect he can keep his gardener and maid employed even if he gets his taxes raised a bit.
Agreed that the amount that is fair for him to pay depends upon the situation of the nation.
If the country is in the middle of some life-or-death struggle, like World War II or a new Black Plague, one would have to be an absolute fool to say, “Well, since we can’t tax Bob more than x%, I guess we’ll just have to cut back efforts to battle Nazis/find a cure for the Dreaded Boom-Boom Disease. I hope we all survive until April 15, 2011, so we can re-address these issues and figure out how much money we have to defeat these threats.”
Conversely, if we adopt the suggestions of the Natural Law Party and use transcendental meditation to cure every wrong in society at no cost to the taxpayer, it would make no sense to tax Bob at x% just because that’s a respectable amount for someone to give to the state.
However, in general, if society is dealing with the general raft of problems that come with modern society, we aren’t involved in major wars, we don’t have any overwhelming social crisis, the economy is in respectable shape, etc.; I would lay down a marker of a third of his gross income as being a reasonable basis for further discussion.
For the sake of illuminating the discussion, here are two charts that illustrate the rough amount of Federal and State taxes that people tend to pay.
Pretty much exactly what I was going to write. Too bad everyone else ignored the only reasonable answer. If we more or less equalize the pain, we are in the right ballpark. Clearly for some people any federal taxes at all would come at the expense of food, clothing or shelter. The are the “lucky duckies” (remember them? :rolleyes: ) but it seems many people would screw the poor out of a misplaced sense of fairness but get all bent out of shape by taxing the rich an increment they are unlikely to even notice.
Don’t try to play that trickle down bollocks card. It hardly matters where the money enters the economy so long as it stays there. In addition I believe that Bob is a salesman, He employs nobody. DooDad inc isn’t going to lay off employees because Bob gets taxed more.
Well, my assumption is Bob doesn’t have his money stuffed in a mattress somewhere. If he’s making $10 million a year then he’s got to have SOME investments…or he’s already paying way to much in taxes and he’s probably not nearly so wealthy as folks seem to think he is.
Well, he could be. But then he probably just lost a hell of a lot in the last 2 years so he’s probably not doing as hot as folks in this thread are assuming, ehe?
I’m sure he is. In which case he’s transferring capital to the government so that we can have all this neat stuff we have, right? But I seriously doubt Bob-o has put the bulk of his investments into subprime mortgages and T-Bills. Does Bob-o-rino have a house? Well, someone had to build it. Does Bobby boy have a car? Again, someone has to build that. And so on. If we take Billy Bob’s money then he is not only NOT going to buy those things in the quantity he was before, but he’s not going to have that money to invest back into the system, which means that others aren’t going to have boB’s capital investments in order to do stuff…like hiring or keeping Joe and his Cow-orkers employed. So sad for them.
In the end, taxes are a balancing act. You don’t want to kill that gold laying goose just because it would taste good today. You want to keep that sucker laying golden eggs.
Raise his taxes to 66% (which is the level that I was responding to) and I’d have to say…you are dreaming. It would have a rather unfortunate effect and, in the end I suspect you’d actually be bringing in substantially LESS taxes. YMMV, but I think if you and others ever got your wish and could actually soak the rich to your hearts desires that you wouldn’t like the actual real world results.
This is tough to do (at least for me.) I don’t make $10m so if I imagine making $10m I’m not all that unhappy paying 50% in taxes. If I was actually making that much money I’d probably be steamed.
And instead of Bob’s money paying people via his investments, his money is paying people via the government. Just think of all the soldiers and census-takers and contractors and bureaucrats that’ll lose their jobs if we tax Bob less. Sure, you don’t want to kill the goose, but what you’re suggesting is that we stop collecting the eggs.
My flip answer is, “Whatever the market will bear.”
My non-flip answer is the same, but worded better. Basically, the state has a duty to promote the general welfare. If a more prosperous society can be generated by lowering taxes on the rich, then they should be lowered. If a more prosperous society can be generated by raising those taxes, they should be raised. (The same goes for the non-rich too, of course.)
The problem, of course, is that it’s fiendishly difficult to predict with precision what will happen if a tax is raised slightly to pay for Public Program A, B, or C. (Or, what will happen if Public Program Z is cut, and taxes lowered slightly.) We might know what will happen in extreme situations, or what types of things will generally happen given a particular action. But figuring out whether a particular action will, on the balance, have a significant positive effect for society is not easy.
Given how prosperous the United States currently is, I think there’s a good prima facie case that the current rates are pretty good.
But I’m not saying to tax Bobby boy less, so that’s a strawman. I’m saying that taxing Billy Bob at 66% (or 50%, or even 45%) would be a Bad Thing™ because you wouldn’t get more money in taxes…you’d wind up with less since the real world effect would be to lower investment (as well as a bunch of other stuff). You’d kill off the goose at the higher rates, and probably stifle it’s golden egg laying potential at the lower end.
Personally, I think that our current tax rate is pretty close to optimal from the perspective of actually bringing in money for the government. Go lower and you have a bunch of other problems. Higher and you get a different set of problems. Oh, it could be tweaked, and if I’m being honest (I’m going through an honesty phase lately for some reason), I’d say it could probably be tweaked up a bit at the highest levels (maybe even a bit at the not so highest levels as well). Maybe as much as 2-3%. But the kinds of tweaks folks in this thread seem to be indicating? That shows a serious lack of understanding about even the basics of economic reality.
Really, if you think about the obscene amount of money that government DOES bring in (which, even with the ‘low’ taxes still seems to be rising for some curious reason, with the exception of when the economy is tits up), I don’t really think the problem is lack of funds on the governments part. And I don’t think that some of the folks in this thread even care that much about the AMOUNT of taxes the government brings in. No, this is yet another thread about ‘fairness’ and what’s ‘fair’…which boils down to ‘soak the rich and make those dirty fucker PAY!’, IMHO. Even if it brought in less money (which, IMHO, raising taxes on the highest earners would accomplish), I don’t think that some of these folks would care, because by gosh! it would be so much more ‘fair’.
We had a massive debt to repay after WW2. A Republican president raised the marginal rate to 90% or 92% and not only did revenues explode but we also had far higher economic growth than we’ve had over the past few decades of low taxes and big deficits.
Recently we can look at what happened when Clinton raised taxes to reduce a then-record deficit inherited from GOP presidents. We were told by the GOP that the tax increases meant economic catastrophe and collapsing revenues but by the end of the decade Clinton had actually created a balanced budget for the first time in living memory and then an actual surplus, even paying down the national debt two years in a row, something we could only dream of doing now.
Then Bush 43 came along and cut taxes which along with a bunch of new pro-growth business-friendly policies caused tax revenues to collapse, created a record deficit and brought us a whopping 1.9% average GDP growth during the Bush years, roughly half the average growth of the previous few decades and about a third of the average frowth during the high tax 1950s/60s.
Poor Joe and his family (and the employees and families of the other 200 people who Bob’s capital employs) when they lose their jobs. So sad for them but you managed to squeeze Bob for some extra cash…well, before he either sheltered it somewhere else or moved somewhere else. So sad for you that Bob and his capital aren’t available anymore, but I’m sure you feel really good about how you’ve leveled the playing field, right? That goose tastes good, ehe? Who needs gold…