If only rich people and corporations payed taxes, just a 15% flat tax across the board and all the loop holes gone. The debt would turn into a surplus......
My take is that this is basically what inflation is. Use the money for something useful, or it becomes worthless.
This is basically the principal behind universal basic income; adding more money to the pool by sending everyone a monthly check devalues the existing supply of money. If you have a billion dollars stuck in a savings account, the purchasing power of that billion goes down, incentivizing you to use it on something useful. That hurts you more the more money you have. As for prices increasing because of inflation; that's the beauty of mailing everyone a check. That takes care of that problem at the level of basic needs (food, medical care, housing, transportation), but not at the level of private jet flights being subsidized.
The effective tax rate for the rich has stayed very flat over time, and it has never been 90%. That is an internet myth that is somehow floated around that most people don't bother to check up on.
That conflates capital gains and income tax, which to be fair I didn’t specify. But yes, with capital gains rates, effective tax rates have gone down. Income tax mostly the same.
33 trillion dollars is a lot of money. Even unresonable levels of tax expansion across the would take forever to make that back, not to mention that that doest stop additional spending which still would likely be in excess of what we would collect extra.
> To wit, “The Stat” is that the highest-earning one percent of taxpayers pay 40 percent of all income taxes. […] The first problem with The Stat is that it makes no reference to the proportion of income the rich earn. The juxtaposition between one percent and 40 percent is meant to convey the idea that a small number of people are carrying a gigantic and disproportionate burden, but the figure lacks any context when it omits how much money they earn in the first place.
> Indeed, it turns the fact that rich people account for a massive share of the income pool into a reason to see them as mistreated. One common move for polemicists brandishing this figure is to note that the share of taxes paid by the rich is “up sharply” over the past couple decades — which it is, on account of rich people claiming a larger share of the national income. The logic implied by The Stat is that the bigger the proportion of income earned by the richest one percent, the more imperative it is to reduce their tax rates, so that they don’t pay too high a share of the tax burden.
> Between 2014 and 2018, the 25 wealthiest Americans collectively earned $401bn, but paid just $13.6bn – about 3.4% of that – in taxes, according to a bombshell ProPublica investigation into the finances of the wealthiest Americans released on Wednesday.
[…]
> Billionaires in tech pay the lowest tax rate, an average of 17% of their income, largely because their wealth comes from such investment income. Bill Gates, whose income from 2013 to 2018 was an average of $2.85bn a year, paid an average effective federal income tax rate of 18.4%. Lauren Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, earned an average of $1.57bn and paid an average tax rate of 14.8%. Ten of the top 15 earners on the list are billionaires who made their money in tech.
> In comparison, the average single worker earning $45,000 paid an average tax rate of 21%. A married couple with one child who earns $200,000 paid a rate of 26%. In 2018, the highest top rate on ordinary income, which excludes investments, was 37%, yet the average tax rate for the 400 wealthiest Americans was 22% from 2013 to 2018.
When you grab most of the income generated in the economy (leaving little for the folks at the bottom), then of course you pay most of the income taxes.
People that call for “the rich” to pay more taxes usually mean those earning above 100k. At least thats how it is in the uk. At some point it will become more convenient to just earn a low wage or none at all.
Really? You'd rather earn less than earn more and pay tax on some of it? Personally I'd go for earning more (if it's a choice) and paying the higher taxes instead of voluntarily lowering my income.
It’s about the incentives and marginal change. Sure, you’d go for earning more, but now you’re less incentivized to do so. It might not matter to you, but it matters to the people at the margins — the people who are just on the edge of being willing to make an upward move but will decline to do so if their potential gross is lower than it otherwise could’ve been.
The problem in the parent's post is that people advocating for "taxing the rich" aren't actually talking about people who are being payed $100K. They are talking about people whose wealth comes from owning property.
In that case, I'm not sure that our intuition about the effect of marginal incentives necessarily applies to the same degree. E.g. if a wealthy industrialist decides not to invest in a some piece of capital, it's not as though the capital ceases to exist; it will just be used by someone else. E.g. if an industrialist decides not to invest in a gold mine, then it's not as though the gold disappears. The land will simply be developed by someone else.
Being less motivated to push for higher income is a far cry from deciding you don't want it and would rather have a lower income.
Also I haven't seen any plans that would remove particularly much motivation below a million dollars, and by the time you're making a million dollars I wouldn't say there needs to be motivation to go for more.
I (UK) contribute the majority of my salary to my pension; as much as it makes sense to do. As far as the taxman is concerned it’s not income and so I drop down tax bands. My take-home is less, but my overall wealth is higher.
It’s true that I may never see that pension, but money given to the taxman is money I’ll never see again anyway.
Not everyone wants to constantly earn more money. Especially when the government will steal a portion of it for themselves. If the work to benefit ratio is not good people are not going to bother earning more. If society only pays 10% more for 100% more effort people are not incentivized to do it.
It’s not just income tax. You lose certain allowances when your salary exceeds a certain level, such as childcare. There definitely are scenarios when a pay rise can actually make you poorer.
>People that call for “the rich” to pay more taxes usually mean those earning above 100k.
Good Lord, 100k? I was making more than that in 1999. When I say rich, I am saying anyone who makes more than 1 - 1.5 million a year. 100k is just over poverty these days...
That depends on whether the median person is living in poverty or not. There are definitely places in the US where it would be very difficult to raise a family or buy a home on the median income.
> That depends on whether the median person is living in poverty or not.
Well, no, even if we stretched the definition of poverty to cover people making the national median personal income, people making 2.5× that still wouldn’t be in or just over poverty, but, sure, if you redefine poverty to include the wealthy than the wealthy are “poor”. But there are people actually in poverty by its common definition, and people making $100k/yr—which was asserted to be on the edge of poverty generally these days upthread—have more in common with people making $1 million/yr than with those people in actual poverty.
> There are definitely places in the US where it would be very difficult to raise a family or buy a home on the median income.
“It’s difficult to buy a home” isn’t poverty, and the subject wasn't people earning the median personal income but $100k/yr.
I don't think you will find many people advocating that the relevant point be 100K. Even setting aside that many people are advocating wealth taxes rather than income taxes, the breakpoints I see advocated for increased income taxes are generally 250K or 400K.
A flat tax on... what? Income? What is income? Capital gains? Realised or unrealised capital gains? Also, what are "rich people"? Is it the "millionaires and billionaires" Bernie Sanders used to talk about before he became a millionaire himself or only the "billionaires" he now speaks about? Not to single out Sanders the question is an important one since one man's "rich man" is another man's servant. To the homeless bum on the street you will be "rich", to you Sanders is "rich", to Sanders Musk is ¨rich". Who gets to pay?
Flat taxes sound great in theory but they end up having a far larger impact on those for whom the tax directly cuts into their ability to pay for basic necessities. Will there be an minimum guaranteed spendable income limit below which the tax will not be taken?
The problem with that is not all labour is the same. Should a weathly farmer be taxed less than a hairdresser? It’s a more physically demanding and dangerous job.
Neither of them would meet that definition of "the rich" since they are both income gained through labor. Therefore, neither of them would have their taxes raised by a policy of "taxing the rich".
the "millionaires and billionaires" Bernie Sanders used to talk about before he became a millionaire himself
Eh, when the term "millionaire" was made, a million dollars was worth about 30x less.
We can't keep focusing on the number 1000000 forever when we have constant inflation. A million dollars isn't even enough to let the average person retire and have a median income lifestyle.
