Principle? Why do people who do not smoke oppose sin taxes?
Why do I, who have never had kids, have to pay taxes to put other people’s kids through school?
Yes, but the principle of “All people should be considered equal, and have the same rights as everybody else” is a strong one, and covers your thoughts about gay marriage and the rights of minorities.
I don’t know. Why DO they oppose it? Why would they care? ARE there people who don’t smoke who are against sin taxes?
Because they hate poor people and consider them lazy and unproductive?
Because rich people have more money, and need it less. Hence they could do a lot of good with that money. Instead, they figure out ways to avoid giving back to the community in the form of taxes.
The world has problems. And here are these people who could help make those problems better, but they hoard stuff they don’t need for themselves, or use it only to make themselves richer.
And, yes, the same can be said about charity. But taxes are better in one respect–you can’t opt out of them to save yourself. Or, at least, that’s the way they are supposed to work. But rich people like to use loopholes in laws or use their vast wealth to reduce their tax burden, solely for their own benefit. And even charity is done just to make them look good and get tax exemptions.
There is all this money out there that could be used to make this crappy world better. But it’s not being used that way. That’s why I care.
Paying taxes in and of itself is a different argument. Mine is, if you make $50,000 a year, why do you care how much in taxes a person who makes $1 million a year pays in taxes?
Yes, I get that you care about rich people paying MORE taxes. But it seems like a lot of people who aren’t rich care so much that they want to see rich people paying LESS taxes. That was my question. WHY do people who aren’t rich want the rich to pay less taxes? As I said up thread, I might not have been as clear as I could have been in the original post.
The Prosperity Gospel is considered heretical* by every branch of Christianity except a lot of American micro and not so micro churches, which use it to scalp their flocks.
- technical term. Depending on the specific organization’s own view on PR, actual terms used may be milder.
Do these people all vote ®, by chance?
No rich ever paid close to 90%. There were a vast number of shelters and loopholes they took advantage of. When Reagan lowered the tax rate he closed the loopholes.
Yes, I am. I don’t think the state should tax anything just by calling it a “sin”. If it is that bad, it should be illegal. If it isn’t, it should be the same as any other product. There are a lot of unhealthy things that I don’t like but I don’t think they should have a special tax just because of that.
The mistake is thinking that the existing (or any proposed) tax system is logical or economically efficient. None of them are and they all require a bunch of value judgments. It will be great when someone finally designs a computer simulator that can run all the scenarios and determine the economic benefits and drawbacks to all of them but we don’t have one yet.
Nobody actually paid the aforementioned 90% top tax rate even when it was in place. The term “tax shelter” was a common and effective term when rates were very high. This is the thing that economic liberals seem to be willfully ignorant about. Rich people can shield wealth and income from taxes because they have lawyers and CPA’s to help them do it and there is almost always a bunch of giant loopholes that makes that perfectly legal.
All you are doing is encouraging creative accounting and distorting various markets. The government still isn’t going to get much of it. It would take a massive re-write of the entire U.S. tax code to prevent that and the result would also affect many middle-class Americans as well because it would have to be so straightforward that almost no deductions are allowed and it would cause economic disruption on its own at least for a number of years.
I find OP’s question to be odd. Not Doper is ignorant, of course, but I wonder if OP posted before drinking his morning coffee. Let me try to help.
(1) Some people do not want to run up the national debt unduly.
(2) To avoid paying for public services by creating debt, they’d prefer government raise money with taxes.
Are you with me, so far, OP?
Now who should we tax?
We could have someone making $50,000 and paying $5000 in tax pay $10,000 instead. That person might have his life-style cramped, and only an additional $5000 is raised.
Or we could have someone making $2,000,000 a year and paying $150,000 in taxes pay $200,000 instead. Ten times as much money is raised and the millionaire, however mistreated, will get by without applying for food stamps.
Clear?
TL;DR: Why do we tax the rich? Because that’s where the money is.
Taxes are zero sum. If someone else is paying less, that means that I’m paying more.
I think the OP is asking: why do people who are not rich oppose raising taxes on the rich?
If that is the question, then part of the answer is that the GOP has done a masterful job of convincing the white working poor that they will someday be rich and therefore must protect the rich from taxation; remember Joe the Plumber? In fact, America isn’t a particularly socially mobile place. The conservative movement has also tied protecting the financial interests of the wealthy to white race identify politics since Nixon.
Because a significant number of Americans believe that they can be rich one day if only they work hard or (fill in the blank) and they don’t want to over-tax their future selves/heirs or penalize hard work.
Or we’ve borrowed it and made it our kids’ problem.
To follow up on septimus, setting tax policy is an important government function and we should all care about important government functions.
Not just me, but other people who aren’t rich as well. People for whom that money is needed for necessities or near-necessities, rather than conspicuous luxuries.
Except septimus approached the question as though it were "why would the not-rich support higher taxes on the rich?" The OP is asking why so many of the non-rich OPPOSE the idea.
OP, it really is because there are a LOT of Americans who have been persuaded that they are either Joe the Plumber or a temporarily distressed Jay Gatsby. 33% of Americans being this way boggles your mind? It shouldn’t. It happens every four years that a similar percentage of Americans are wrong about, f’rinstance, who should be President.
As to the OP, there are basically two reasons why the non-wealthy care about taxes applied to the rich.
There’s the issue of fairness - the perception that rich people aren’t paying their fair share.
Then there’s the perception (fed by many politicians) that we can pay for the things we need by making the rich pay more, that higher taxes need only apply to the rich and everything will be A-OK.