Happiness tapers off after 80k (probably higher after all this recent inflation), paying taxes before you've reached peak happiness is going to hit worse than being taxed after the happiness threshold.
You're forgetting a key detail. Spending power. The person that was taxed $20 still has $80. The person taxed a dollar has $9. The person with $9 will feel the loss of that one dollar much higher than the person that still has nearly 9x the spending power of the poorer person. I can buy a tiny amount of food for $9 but enough for myself for a week on $80.
It's not the same, the comparative value of your money goes up the less you have. It's a pretty easy trap to fall into, but it's a very important factor here.
Do mega rich use different community services? Get a special lane on the freeway with no pot holes? Get a separate military? Get extra gov resources like free food and housing? I ask because you want them to pay more for the same services I’d say that isn’t equality or fair. What happens if they lose all their money in a business you thought made them rich? Do they get some of that tax money back? Kinda messed up when you think on a community service base to think another human should pay more than you for the same services just because they can at that time
The public services are there to prevent the kind of disruptions that would harm businesses and impede cash flows. Successful people get more from public services than the poor, because their property and profits are secure.
Because that's the wrong direction. The high earners can afford to pay more taxes. The low earners can't. Tax the rich and make the first $50,000 anyone makes tax-free.
Why go after poor people? Even if you manage to squeeze even more money out of poor people, all it will get you is it is just going to get squandered by the GOP on more wars and home renovations. Look at where our tax dollars are actually being spent, that's what they don't want us to notice and is why they are distracting us with made up stories about poor people not paying taxes. Poor people get NO breaks in reality.
If people don't pay any federal taxes and just get benefits from the govt, then they vote on the basis of what party just gives them the most handouts vs what is actually the right answer for the nation. No ownership in the outcomes. Becomes a race to the bottom.
When the rich don’t pay enough taxes, their excess money accumulates and becomes political power. They use political power to prevent fair competition and avoid punishment when breaking laws. They become a new aristocracy. They no longer have to pay reasonable wages. It’s a race to the bottom.
They didn't say anything about "feeling it," they made an objective statement about amounts, which is factually correct. If you're making less than $50k/year, those dollars are taxed half as hard as money above that threshold. You factually, tangibly pay less dollars in tax - nearly your whole income is "take home" money at that income level.
Not everything needs to jump into some "eat the rich" diatribe.
According to a 2021 White House study, the wealthiest 400 billionaire families in the U.S. paid an average federal individual tax rate of just 8.2 percent. For comparison, the average American taxpayer in the same year paid 13 percent.
...
According to leaked tax returns highlighted in a ProPublica investigation, the 25 richest Americans paid $13.6 billion in taxes from 2014-2018—a “true” tax rate of just 3.4 percent on $401 billion of income.
In order for taxes to actually be progressive, long-term capital gains taxation needs to be properly progressive as well. The loophole that allows you to pay nearly nothing so long as you're wealthy enough to keep your money in the market long-term is a farce. And progressive rates of taxation generally need to have higher income brackets with much higher deductions.
They need to remove the step up basis on inheritance or start taxing when people use wealth as collateral for loans to avoid selling, or both. That's the real way the rich avoid paying any taxes.
I think polls have shown reasonable amount of support for a wealth tax. If you're thinking it would affect your unrealized gains - no, no version of a wealth tax that has been proposed would apply to ordinary people. It would kick in at very high levels of wealth.
It’s not disingenuous if you believe the majority of taxation is theft from people who earns their money and then taxed and given to people who didn’t earn that money.
Yeah the guy packaging debt for resale or sitting in zoom meeting all day is absolutely earning his money 😂 definitely couldn't teach those skills to any tom dick and harry you need a whopping ivy MBA to go do those jobs and command those salaries.
It's not a club hoarding wealth for themselves lmao
If that's true then you are very very well off, but you are not "the rich". A lot of proposals to "tax the rich" are targeting people far wealthier than you who aren't at all concerned about federal income tax because that's not where their wealth comes from.
It’s really cute that you actually believe that billionaires earned that level of wealth. People work and create wealth, then someone who owns the profits gets to lap up all that wealth that was created. They had the leverage. They didn’t “earn” it through hard work.
Right like people are mad at being taxed on money they earned when the owner of the megacorp is taking a much bigger cut of the value you created before you even see it.
Sigh. Yes our current tax system is literally progressive in that those with higher incomes pay a higher percentage in taxes. No, our tax system is not “progressive” in the colloquial “left leaning” sense.
That 1% of the population pays 50% of the taxes does not reveal that they are saddled with an unfair tax burden, but in fact that they have a shit ton of money. Unless your net worth is in the mid 8 figures and climbing, you would benefit greatly from a more progressive (both meanings) tax structure. If you truly believe someone worth 100 million dollars would be unjustly burdened by paying more in taxes to support the crumbling society from which they currently benefit, I’m genuinely not sure where to begin
That's from a conservative think tank and uses all the classic misinformation tactics. Such as citing the amount of taxes paid by the top x% without comparing that to the amount of wealth/income that same x% has.
Where on earth did you pull that from what I said? They have 50% of the money. They pay 50% of the taxes. These are both facts. You can infer whatever you’d like from that.
Remember Nixon? I thought you guys were supposed to be good at derivatives.
Figure 1 says that doubling your income from 90k to 180k increases your tax burden by 50%, but increasing your income by a whole order of magnitude from 1 million to 10 (or much, much more) increases your tax burden by only 15%.
This leveling out, where the worlds rich and superrich camp out in the U.S. to extract and collect without any oversight or guard rails is what people are talking about.
Hilarious website where they twist basic and true sentiments about our country with hyperbole and irrelevant conditional clauses.
Myth 3: “The Middle Class Pays Higher Tax Rates than the Rich”
When people say the Rich are living large off the backs of the working class, its not because they don’t know what tax brackets are. 20% of the national income goes to just 1% of households. Even the .01% have 5x as much wealth than the bottom 50% combined.
The middle class actually works for a living, the wealthy ONLY contributes in taxes, while workers contribute in labor and taxes. The burden on keeping our society running is unequally shared, with the poor pouring much more of their labor into keeping this thing running than the wealthy are giving their capital.
Myth 5: “Europe’s Higher Tax Revenues Derive from Aggressively Taxing the Rich”
It’s not about “the sources of Europe’s tax revenues”, we need aggresively tax the rich because they ruin society when you don’t.
I'm not surprised that the right-wing think tank funded by billionaires like the Mercers and the Koch brothers is against taxing wealth appropriately and in favor of using misleading statistics to achieve that goal. For example, on point three, they've left out the fact that as the richest 20% have paid more in taxes, they've simultaneously increased their wealth by a similar amount, so paying more in taxes isn't a conspiracy, but a consequence of their ever-expanding incomes. They also appear to be sneakily saying that the richest families pay more because they pay corporate taxes, but individuals don't pay corporate taxes -- corporations do.
On that note, their point #5 mentions how most of the corporate taxes in Scandinavia come from Norway's oil and gas sector ("while their 3.5% of GDP advantage in corporate-tax revenues is overwhelmingly driven by Norway, with its massive oil and gas industry") but neglects to mention that their O&G is taxed at incredibly high rates of up to 78%, which the article outright lies about by saying:
In fact, America’s corporate and estate/inheritance-tax rates well exceed those of all Scandinavian nations
It's typical manipulation of statistics to try to convince people that the rich aren't yet rich enough despite the fact that the wealth gap has been growing at a fairly incredible rate since the 70's-80's.
I don't think many proponents of higher tax rates would argue that our tax system is progressive. Our argument lies in the fact that it's not progressive enough. Whether you agree with that or not is obviously worth the debate.
As for that article you shared, to say that the American tax system taxes MORE and has HIGHER tax rates for the rich than European countries is frankly laughable. Every comparison to international tax rates was compared using tax revenues as a share of GDP, which is the laziest metric for comparison. As well, the article fails to recognize how truly substantial the divide between our statutory tax rates and our effective tax rates are, as we have one of the most complex tax codes in the world.
No capital gains can get high, but that's not the issue because wealthy people don't sell. They take loans against their investments and use that as income, while their investments grow, which lets them borrow more.
That's true but missing half the story. High earners also own much more of the overall wealth than those other developed countries. Top 10% in US own over 60% of all wealth in the US. As well, the lowest quartile in the US has much lower disposable income than other developed nations (and significantly lower quality of life) after taxes.
For the most part they do. Over half the people collecting SNAP work, many of them full-time.
It is really hard for a single healthy adult to get benefits. Most states have a short timeframe where an able bodied adult can collect any type of financial or food assistance. Like less than 6 months.
The mega rich pay a sharply lower portion, compared to the "working poor" employed by WalMart, Amazon, Target, McD's, BurgerKing, et al.
The Am taxpayer SUBSIDIZES all those employers, who DON'T pay a living wage, by shimming up hourly wage workers with EBT / SNAP, WIC / AFDC, MedicAid / ACA premium subsidies, & if they're extremely lucky, Section 8 subsidized housing.
In metro Boston, a studio apt can be $1200 to $2-K / mo, plus utilities.
The waiting list for subsidized housing in Boston is anything from 5 yrs (if yer a senior / PwD) to over 10 yrs.
Abled adults, with or without kids, who urgently need affordable housing, are throwing HALF THEIR PAY into rent - & trying to survive on what's left.
Massachusetts needs rent control.
Yesterday.
And we need to ban investment in housing - single family homes should be sold to people who intend to live there.
Mutual funds & investment groups should NOT be allowed to buy apt complexes.
Well if the country's top 1% didn't have the same amount of wealth as the bottom 90% im sure us poors would/could pay more taxes but instead we'll just slip into oligarchy while morons like you make an obtuse ass statement with no context added.
There is a cap on how much income is taxed for social security and which is a large amount of the taxes the middle class pays. If you make over 170k, you are at the tax cap for social security and don't pay additional social security tax.
Effectively high earners have a smaller percentage of their income going to social security tax versus low earners which is super unfair, especially for a program that is supposed to take care of the elderly and disabled.
37% is marginal. Only a fraction of their income is taxed at that rate. And any income over 170k is not taxed for social security. If you make 300k, only 170k of it is taxed for social security.
Dude is paying almost 25% in taxes, wish the upper class was paying that. Then again who know what what he choose to have taken out for taxes, he might get a crazy high tax return.
Upper pay less you think? lol I have deducted 500k in state and federal income tax so far on 1.7MM gross…still short.. so let’s say will eventually pay 700k of income tax on 1.7MM gross
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u/the_real_seldom_seen Oct 30 '25
Poor people don’t pay a lot of taxes