In reality, we would need substantial increases in our taxation of the wealthy to reach such a point. The CBO estimate is that the effective federal tax rate on the top 1% of taxpayers was 33% in year 2001. It is doubtful that their state and local taxes, which tend to be lower in general and regressive brought this up to anywhere near the levels of which you speak. [Note also the the CBO estimate of 33% includes 6.4% which is an assignment of all the corporate taxes to the shareholders…an assumption that is probably only partly true; in fact, when it suits their purposes, Republicans like to claim that the corporate taxes are basically just passed on to consumers as higher prices.]
Two other points:
(1) We can expect to see a considerable drop in the effective tax rate for the top 1% due to the Bush tax cuts. (CBO’s data is only through 2001.) My WAG is that it will go down to about 28%.
(2) I believe that one of the points in the “Perfectly Legal” legal book I linked to is that the rich in particular have some pretty good ways of hiding some of their income, so it is likely that the CBO estimates of effective tax rates are a little on the high side anyway (unless they somehow tried to correct for this).
See, this kind of talk always irritates me. They received the money because the market was willing to pay it to them. That is a far cry from “earning” it. Those two might mean the same things if we did in fact have a free market economy where all people start on a level playing field. But we don’t. People of wealth and privilige start out with more, and they end with more.
For every anecdotal “self made man taking risk” story Mr. Moto can come up with, I can find 5 Paris Hiltons. People who have received more simply owe more to society for the good life that our system of government and society allows them to lead.
And a last point, I have heard time and again from Human Resource people that extra pay does not give hourly workers extra incentive to work harder. (Sorry, no cites.) But yet, for some reason, wealthy people will all cash it in if they have to pay more taxes? Sheesh, gimme a break. Bill Gates does not work for the money any more. Dick Cheney does not work for the money any more. Taxing wealth a little higher is not going to stall the economy. When Clinton raised rates in the early 90’s, did you see an economic collapse? Hmm, no.
Taxing income at 100% would be pointless. Taxing income at 0% would be pointless. The answer is in the middle. People advocating increased taxes on the upper income are not advocating a return to days of 75% tax bracket. We are arguing about 10 or 15% points. Can you really say with great authority that the level of taxation right now is burdensome, and 5% less would be a paradise of investement and 5% more would cause society to fall?
Aha! Now I know what that kock on the window was! Obviously 2sense lured me away from my computer long enough to see my main ideas and steal them for himself. The really annoying part is that he added some extra tasty sarcasm to the narrative.
Agreed…Although I don’t see any real evidence of the shooting ourselves in the foot actually happening in the U.S. at this point. As I noted, the CBO data on income trends provides some evidence that the economic and tax policies under Reagan didn’t really help fuel a very broadly-based rise in incomes and that it was only under Clinton that the rises in income were more broadly shared (although still quite unequally…especially toward the very top).
How do you know what level the OP was advocating? He may have had just such a level in mind. And this level certainly isn’t out of the norm in many countries. Scandinavia comes instantly to mind.
Scandinavian countries also doesn’t have much of an entrepreneurial economy, incidentally. They’ve traded risk taking for the safety and security of the welfare state.
The rich don’t pay big taxes. Kerry, for example, is filthy rich. His buddies are filthy rich. No way are they going to tax themselves. Were that so, they would be pushing a wealth tax.
They will tax you. They’re pushing an income tax. They don’t have taxable income, they’ve got tax sheltered trusts.
Ever notice how government workers are all in favor of tax hikes? A tax hike is a raise in pay to those guys.
In California there’s a Ceasar Chavez day. The guys in the field get to work harder so they can pay more taxes so the state employees can take a day off.
But don’t worry. If you live long enough, you’ll get Social Security and you can vote to raise taxes on the poor slob in the fields and get yourself a raise in pay. A little one, anyway.
I’ve heard it said that most Americans support a tax system that would give them the best advantage if they were in the income bracket they wished they were in, rather than the one they actually ARE in.
But in the end, it all comes down to your definition of “fair”. Personally, I’d like to see us focus on closing all the tax loopholes and crazy decuctions. The really, really rich don’t bother much with what the tax brackets are-- they just move their money around so that it’s sheltered from taxes as much as possible.
Ok, but every single one of the relationships you mentioned were free associations freely contracted and compensated for. Did the coffee vendor require the government to force him ot buy coffee? Did the bed manufacturer? You cannot go from the obvious truth that society is complex and interconnected to a carte blanche justification for confiscatory tax policies.
But how does this mechanism manifest itself? Are you saying that we should simply trust our honerable government to adjust the tax rate until it is just right? Surely you are not arguing that the government is in a better posititon to decide how money should be distributed than the rest of us.
I like emotionally loaded words as much as the next guy, but let’s see if we can do a bit better. Any time anyone wants to say “confiscatory”, they are required to actually estimate in some objective way (dollars, percent, jellybeans) just what the hell they’re talking about. Similarly, should someone want to tax the rich “more”, they might do well to indicate “how much” more so we can at least know where we all stand.
Cite? [As I recall, some of the Scandinavian countries ranked quite high in the annual list of the most economically-free countries that the WSJ editorial page always touts and is produced by some conservative organization like Heritage. I am sure if there were any easy way to make them come out lower on the list, they would have.]
Well, in the country I live in, it’s a democracy and we are the government. Granted, it ain’t perfect and the current administration is doing its best to undermine the democracy in various ways but I am not yet willing to concede that the government is not ours.
Here is a report on Kerry’s tax return and here is another report showing Bush’s and Cheney’s in addition to Kerry’s. Note that Kerry reported $175,000 in capital gains from the sale of a painting. As I understand it, the capital gains tax cuts that Bush passed and Kerry wants to repeal at least on those earning income in his range, saves him quite a bit.
You know, it may surprise you, but some people actually make public policy decisions on the basis of what they think is right (and what they think is best in a broader self-interest sense where having to live in a virtual fortress and see lots of homeless folks wandering the streets and stuff is considered a negative) rather than what is in their own narrow financial self-interest.
While some people do like to exaggerate the amount the rich are getting “soaked”, the fact is that the rich do pay taxes, as my link to the CBO study shows. However, their income tends to be different than yours and mine. They get much more of their income from capital gains and dividends and much less from wages than we do. That is why Republican attempts to reduce (or even eliminated!) taxes on unearned income like capital gains and dividends would be such a big win for the rich.
This unfortunately is true. Scandinavian economies have consistently underperformed compared to the US since the end of WWII. To the point where Scandinavian countries are about as rich (or poor) as the poorest state in the US. Scandinavian citizens today are on average about as wealthy as the average black in America (supposedly the poorest racial group). This is not because Scandinavian workers are a whole lot less effective than American, but because fewer work and those that work, work less. And they work less because they have found out they get more of a return opting for (tax free) time off than (taxed) higher wages.
Reminds me. Monday I’m quitting my work. I have now worked for seven months, which means I’ll shortly move up into the highest tax bracket (64%) – that means the outcome is just too little for me to bother any more. Especially considering I’ll make more working as an “black” unskilled construction day labourer with no experience than I do as a highly specialised IT worker with an university degree and 12 years of experience.
The very high tax margin have also resulted in a massive relocation of wealthy Danes to other countries, mostly London and France, to the extend where London is now the fourth largest Danish city. This not only reduces the tax income, but drains Denmark of just that kind of people we need the most. Recently there has also been a troubling trend where young people with high educations are moving abroad – overwhelming because of the tax rates.
Ever heard of capital gains tax? Inheritance tax? (btw, the Republicans are trying to do away with or significantly cut both) Money doesn’t just appear; it comes from three places - earnings (income), the selling of things (capital gains) and inheritance. The rich don’t have some kind of money pasture where they go out and stand and money falls from the sky, nor do they harvest it out of their gardens. What kind of wealth tax would you like to see?
I’d like some sort of cite that government employees get raises when tax rates go up. I’m sure it happens sometimes, often when that raise is long overdue and had to be given. But the idea that taxes are raised in order to give civil service employees raises is a joke.
Social Security, btw, is legally separate from the rest of the budget, both in intake (SS tax is completely independent of income tax) and legally, of outgo. Unfortunately, this latter has been ignored by most of Congress, which is why we’re likely to have a Social Security crisis in my lifetime (I’m 48). And guess what? you are allowed, even welcome, to vote prior to receiving Social Security.
Conditions for migrant farm workers suck, no doubt about it. But to suggest that they, and only, they are carrying the economic burden of an otherwise wealthy and indolent nation on their bowed shoulders is silly, and will lose your hearers (readers) faster than a speeding bullet. By all means, champion that cause. But if you do so by viewing the world exclusively as “Us” (the farmer workers) and “Them” (everyone else, no matter how poor and locked in), does that cause more harm than good; it alienates the very people most likely to want to help change things.
This is a pretty bogus comparison of relative quality of life for the following reasons, among others:
(1) Cross-country comparisons of income are always dicey. Cost of living is often not the same in different countries. And, the problems for inner city blacks, for example, are not so much low absolute incomes but those incomes relative to what you need to live in a decent neighborhood, obtain decent health care, etc. I’ve been to Copenhagen (actually lived there for almost 4 weeks back in 1992) and I would challenge you to show me a part of that city that is nearly as bad off as the worst parts of Washington D.C.
(2) The comparison is made at the level of GDP which is an mean quantity. But, the distribution of income in the two countries makes a comparison at the mean deceptive because the mean in the U.S. is considerably higher than the median because of the very polarized distribution of income. (The canonical example is always the room that contains 49 homeless people and Bill Gates in which, in terms of average income, the people in the room are billionaires.)
By the way, you consider this a bad thing, but it is somewhat a matter of perspective. I’d be willing to make trade-offs for a higher quality of life for less income and I don’t think a society that does that is necessarily making a bad choice.
Unfortunately, in the U.S., it is very difficult to do. For example, because I have some pre-existing medical conditions I am tied to my job for health insurance. If I wanted to quit and not work for a while (which in principle I have the savings to do) or start my own business or something, an 18 month clock would start ticking after which I would no longer be able to buy into my current employer’s health plan and obtaining health insurance would become very difficult and/or expensive. (And, the only reason I can buy into my employer’s health plan for 18 months after I leave here is because Congress passed a law called “COBRA” mandating this over the strenuous objections of the “laissez-faire” types.)
And this is measurable how? For that matter, if the people maintain a high standard of living and a sustainable economy, this is important because…?
Whereas the US, which is just chock-full of entrepreneurial spirit and benefits for said entrepreneurs (as long as they aren’t trying to challenge any large existent businesses) is better off as a whole because…?
