I’m looking for serious answers to understand the mentality. Please avoid the snark. I know it’s low hanging and tempting but I’m pretty sure most, if not all, of use here on Lemmy “get it”.
I just can’t get out of my head how absurd it is that we, in the U.S. anyway, put so much of the tax burden on working class folks instead of those most benefiting from our economic system.
It seems to me the standard deduction should be at least the median personal income (~$40k) if not the mean(~$60k) with progressive tax brackets adjusted to cover costs thereafter and possibly a supplemental wealth tax.
But I’m not an economist so trying to understand why I’m wildly wrong and this would be a terrible idea either from an economic perspective or from a political perspective.
The argument is: They’re poor, what are they gonna do a about it?
They are less powerful and easier to tax. It’s all about power, The rich by themselves are less powerful than the masses when the masses are together. Which is why they’re taxed at all. There’s something more powerful
The rich control the laws and they don’t want to contribute.
If you are talking about federal income taxes, they are actually progressive. The vast majority of the money collected comes from the top 50%, the 1% pays something like 25% of the total just by themselves. Its why Republicans and billionaires bitch about it so much and want to eliminate the federal income tax. In reality poor people are mostly impacted by sales taxes, and that’s because of the basic economics involved that make sales taxes inherently regressive.
The problem is creative tax application AKA tax evasion. Somehow, rich people manage to pay way below what one would expect in relation to their income.
I think it’s ok for everyone to pay something, and income tax is progressive.
Social security tax is regressive, and sales tax is regressive. So I’d remove the cap on social security, tax unearned income more, and exempt more necessary items from sales tax, if looking to get more from the more wealthy, as income tax is the only one working right - when I was poor my federal income tax was 0, when I was poor with kids I got a little more back than I paid in, now we are doing well, paying lots because we make more at work.
Blind greed and incredible selfishness.
Basically you’re trying to reason madness.
Rich people want to get richer. Rich people can afford to bribe/wine and dine/trade favors with the select few who actually write the law.
That is all. Nobody enjoys paying taxes, but the rich are just the ones in a position to actually do something about it.
Just from a game theory perspective, a distributed group of people who are unorganized are unable to get their concerns addressed properly when it comes time to writing tax laws.
The rich and powerful, by virtue of being rich and powerful, have a voice in writing the tax laws. The distributed poor, do not. So it’s much easier to satisfy income goals by taxing the group who has no feedback loop to the politicians
Great question but you are asking the wrong people as you can see. You won’t find serious arguments or alternative views here.
This really demonstrates what I dislike about Lemmy. Too many people who want to inject their political beliefs into every conversation. Supply side economics is a thing. Whether it works or not is highly subject to debate but it is an entire school of thought in economics.
Yeah. I tried and failed to head it off at the pass. There are some good comments in here though.
They don’t vote as much. They trust the media telling them that oligarchy is bestest for them. Talking point like Harris wants to raise taxes, and Trump wants to lower taxes ignores the context that those raises/lowers are on the rich/oligarchs, and being lower information/invested voters they get deceived.
Well over 95% of the public does not understand the tax code well enough to pay attention to tax proposals, and many poor/simplest tax filings are given to external services. Scamming the public on tax policy, and especially in electoral propaganda/deception, it is very easy to sell stronger oligarchy power over a declining America as if that will improve America if it is shouted loud enough.
The isn’t snark. The answer is simply greed. The rich want to be richer. They want it all. The mentality is, “I don’t care about anyone else, I want it all.”
Edit: removed a redundant sentence
Something I never see mentioned is the risk of “brain drain”. If you tax the rich too heavily, there’s a possibility that they’ll just move to another country with lower taxes, taking their companies (and jobs) with them.
That’s not brain drain. Brain drain is when high qualified people leave their country, mostly because of the lack of infrastructures costing them opportunities for studying or working in their respective field.
What you’re talking about is capital flight. This is an issue that is systematically raised as a counter-argument by liberals in debates on taxation. The problem is that it is seriously overestimated:
- Leaving a country is a lot more complicated than it sounds: you lose your family, your friends, your culture, your habits. Many millionaires who leave their country end up coming back after a few years.
- You can’t relocate your real estate investments.
- Going abroad doesn’t exempt you from paying taxes (especially exit taxes).
- A country that wishes to do so can prohibit the relocation of a profitable company, or even nationalize it.
- Many rich people who threaten to leave if taxes are raised end up doing the math: if there’s a profitable business, they’ll stay. And in a country that finances its infrastructure soundly and has a good distribution of wealth, there’s profitable business to be had.
raised as a counter-argument by liberals in debates on taxation.
Which liberals are defending heavy taxation of the working class?
Not so much defending heavy taxation on the working class specifically, instead focusing solely on why the wealthy and mega corps have to have a low tax rate
They don’t
Not sure if I agree. If you’d do that you’ll lose CEO’s, not the highly skilled workers that actually do the work…one might wonder howuch would be lost there.
Also, where would they go? Any developed country will have it much, MUCH “worse” for them than the US and the alternative is moving to heavenly places like Russia or China. Good luck with that.
You’re equating wealth with intelligence. Bad take.
The argument is that the rich and powerful are rich enough and powerful enough to corrupt the system and not have to pay taxes.
Mathematics and Politics.
There are many more people who are “working class” than rich. The argument is that if you take some money from a lot of people, you get more money than if you take a lot of money from some people.
There’s also the argument that if everyone pitches in, the overall burden for each individual is less.
What this fails to address is that the richer you are, the more you can play with your money and end up with nothing to tax. This is why the rich get richer and the rest of us don’t.
Running through all that is a thing called “trickle down economics” which claims that the money from the rich ends up in society, but recent reviews of this have proven this to be nonsense. Politicians use this as an argument for the status quo.
Finally, the rich shape the narrative. Politicians are essentially elected by the rich through their manipulation of the story through their media empires and social media platforms.
The argument is that if you take some money from a lot of people, you get more money than if you take a lot of money from some people.
That’s all dependent on how much you’re taking and from who which I addressed in my comment.
There’s also the argument that if everyone pitches in, the overall burden for each individual is less.
This only makes sense if you define “burden” with a fixed dollar amount. A $6k tax “burden” is going to be a much harder burden on someone who makes $40k than someone who makes $250k
What this fails to address is that the richer you are, the more you can play with your money and end up with nothing to tax.
This could be addressed by the wealth tax I mentioned.
In the end, I do believe it’s politics and the wealthy manipulating people’s perception.
They’ve got us focused on this bullshit culture war when what we need is a good old-fashioned class war.
Because fucking over the poor is how the rich stay rich.
This is political science 101
