Absolutely agreed they can afford it. I just don’t like having disingenuous data presented. The % shown makes it look like they’re not paying as much taxes as the rest of us. The reality is they pay the most. We shouldn’t have to stoop to creating fuzzy charts, we don’t need to because the other numbers are even worse, as you have shown. They own 67% of all the wealth, which is insane.

Thank you for adding the always missing nuance. But other readers don’t get it twisted; parsing the financials of those too wealthy for mere cash liquidity isn’t simple by design. The context is always obscured in Economics because abstraction makes the bills we all pay on their behalf.

And it’s taxed differently

More “taxed not at all”.

Haven’t heard of The Current, I’ll check it out.

All I know about the area is this video.

It doesn’t look like it would attract a lot of outsiders.

I should have looked into it before posting as I misremembered the breadth of the issue, but when I first started going out there for work this was a recent happening: https://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/07/13/somalia.americans.killed/index.html

So it wasn’t terrorist cells as such, but some guys recruiting Somali-Americans to go to Somalia and fight for some other guys.

The problem with sales taxes is they are always regressive. Carve outs don’t help because the rich will just add loopholes.

The rich always propose this as a flat tax because they understand how they benefit from it.

One possibility might be to a progressive sales tax tied to inflation. For example 0% for the first $100, 5% up to $1000…by the time you get to yacht prices the tax would be 50% – it’s all important that corporations pay this same tax so they don’t loop hole their way through having an LLC that owns the yacht and they simply “rent it” from themselves.

The big issue is how corporations are able to deduct the cost of business. If I could do this as a laborer, I would be able to deduct rent, food, vehicles, etc as the cost of supporting the physical entity that performs the labor.

But obviously that’s not how any of this is structured because the human body is not a depreciating asset… Even though it clearly depreciates with time and use.

yeah, i’m not debating the functionality of the current economic system though. It’s definitely up for grabs i suppose.

Mostly just pointing out that even in our current economy we don’t really have a good excuse for most of this shit.

simple solutions don’t solve complex problems, and complex solutions solve complex problems. But complex solutions are generally pretty shitty solutions.

You should strive to have a simple problem, and then find a simple solution. Otherwise you get BMW cars.

yeah which is exactly why i dont want to fucking pay tax myself. Just let the fucking corpo that pays me do it instead.

The optimal clearing price for a good or service doesn’t map to the tax rate. That’s why schemes like a gas tax cut and cuts to real estate rates don’t reduce the price of energy or rent. Also why voucher programs and other tax rebates tend to pair with inflationary prices.

Businesses just pocket the gains in the same way they’re forced to eat the losses when taxes rise.

So high income people don’t use roads, fire, police, the FAA, tax breaks for businesses, etc? They don’t indirectly benefit when their lower income employees, people at the store, people that use whatever drives the high income people’s earnings, etc. are using these social services including food assistance and Medicaid? Do high income people just live in a magical bubble where people have no interaction and connections to each other and they earn money without the input of anyone else? I’d love to live in this fantasy land with you.

The rich person is more likely to require more police services. The rich person is pretty much the only sort of person that’s ever going to have the FBI seriously in their corner. That rich person is more likely to care deeply about the interstate system and the FAA. If a foreign military is coming, the rich are the people that would most desperately want the defense. The rich have the government acting on their best interests in meddling in world affairs and negotiating trade.

Though you probably think welfare is what most taxes go toward, but that’s actually a relatively small piece of the tax funded pie.

Taxes should be treated like insurance. If you’re more likely to use social services, then you should pay more taxes. Those who do not require public social services should not pay taxes at all.

Who’s more likely to need and benefit from a well funded police force? A wealthy man with a lot of property that needs to be protected? Or a poor man with little property, nothing to lose, and a grudge against the rich man hoarding his wealth?

Clearly you’ve never done a hard day’s work in your miserable life, which I hope doesn’t last much longer. People like you disgust me.

I worked my way up from poverty. And I did it the hard way. Heat stroke. Broken bones. 75 hour work weeks. Coming home every day covered in dirt and sweat and too tired to even shower.

Now I make good money and I am honored to pay taxes. Taxes kept me from the brink. Taxes funded the work-study programs, the food banks I visited, the shelters I stayed at while homeless. I pay a TON of taxes and that is fucking GREAT. It’s an investment in my neighbors. I want to live in a good place. I want others to have the opportunities I did.

And I don’t fucking delude myself into thinking I made it out because I’m just that awesome. I worked hard, but I also got LUCKY. My taxes make it more possible for others to follow in my footsteps.

They will be much more likely to incur medical bills they can’t pay.

Wow, you almost got the point there then got completely lost. Low income people can’t pay medical bills because they don’t have the money to do so. How will taxing them help that situation? You seem like a student of the “fuck you, I’ve got mine” school of thought.

Take the Waltons of Walmart fame as an extreme example. They are some of the richest people in America but their Walmart employees include people that are being paid so poorly they also need to collect social services such as food stamps and Medicaid. Walmart pays low wages knowing the employees can’t survive and will be assisted by the taxpayers. Paying lower wages means more profits and more money in the Waltons pockets at the expense of the employees. Do you think the Waltons are spending all their extra earnings on things that incur more taxes or are they just putting it away like a dragon on their pile of treasure?

Walmart also uses taxpayer funded services like public roads to move goods, the FAA and ATC for their corporate and private jets, tax breaks when they build new warehouses or stores, etc. So, are the underpaid Walmart employees the ones leaching off society or is it the high earners like the Waltons causing the issues?

If I earn $500k a year because I went to college and put in far more effort than someone who makes $50k a year, why should I pay multiples more in taxes than them?

Because you are forgetting of the net benefit of taxes that have been paid for decades before you were born, which improved everyone’s standing to allow for:
The training of your teachers to allow you to get your education.
The city infrastructure that allowed you easy access to school, and later to your profession.
The social stability for your business to thrive.
The quality of life for your business’s customers, allowing them to afford to be customers, allowing the business to afford your $500k a year.

You do not live in a vacuum. If all the people who make $50k a year disappeared it would significantly negatively impact your life. “A rising tide raises all ships”, and a society on which everyone can thrive benefits everyone in that society. You can afford to pay a higher % and still thrive, in order to ease the burden on someone who is struggling.

You’re argument of “I make more money than I need, I should keep it and let other people starve” isn’t very compelling.

Lol on how Liberals have no idea what socialism is. :)

Is this a joke? The wealthy consume far more of the efforts of the government than the poor.

A family who earned $500k is likely putting lots of money into some sort of savings or investments while a family making $50k is likely living paycheck to paycheck. The $500k earner can part with a little extra to help benefit the greater good.

Also, your ridiculous “they worked harder and low income people are lazy” schtick is idiotic. Do you think someone who grew up in a poor family, went to an underfunded school district, had to work to help support the family, couldn’t afford college, and works multiple jobs just to live paycheck to paycheck is lazy? Or are the high income middle managers that grew up in high income families, went to good school districts, had college paid for by their parents, spend weekends at their lake house, have full time child care, and earn money off the backs of the lower income people the lazy ones?

You’ve made the claim a couple times that lower earners are just not working as hard, you know that’s not how it goes, right? Me and my wife working as teachers put in the time to go to school, put in the mandatory internships of student teaching, and then work our asses off on 80 hr weeks each to do the job and still walk away with less than $100k income. Are we just lazy?

The graphic is about State taxes, not federal. It’s lacking in information though and hard to draw conclusions from. It’s probably intentionally created to cause anger.

In response to your statements though, the idea is that you can comfortably part with a higher percentage of your money. I’m also in a high tax bracket and I’m not really opposed to a graduated tax rate. Someone’s gotta pay for our military, our roads, social services, police, etc. All of that stuff isn’t going to get funded by people with low income. Social programs can help people lift themselves out of poverty and give them a chance to make something of themselves. They also help protect our nation’s children.

That said, I think the big corporations should shoulder a lot larger portion of that burden than they do. I’m also not keen on the competence and lack of efficiency/effectiveness of our government in a lot of areas.

They say eat the rich, you say eat the lazy, I say don’t eat anyone. I’d love to see our country more unified.

Point of order, do you mean 10x more proportionally to their total or 10x more in general?

They do in percentage.

The rich consume the most government resources. The balance sheet after taxes for the wealthiest is by the most negative in absolute terms. They cost the rest of us more than any other group.

If the average income tax of the top 1% isn’t 20 times higher than the average tax of any of the 20% groups, then they’ll be paying less overall tax. Because there’s 20 times more people in the bigger group.

Or it could be showing that those states have unfair tax rules, which is undoubtedly the case for some of them.

This chart is honestly completely meaningless, because there’s no way to know which of those two conditions exist.

It’s lies, damn lies, and statistics, poured into a rage-bait map.

Edit: However, I would be intrigued to know how the middle 20% managed to pay the least tax in Oregon.

The cited article is for expenses unrelated to taxes. I would like to reiterate that I am not disagreeing that the system is busted, I’m just pointing out that saying that higher income people pay less taxes in literal tax havens is not possible. If they are only paying for sales tax and property tax, the only individuals who will be paying more taxes are property owners, which because of how fucked the system is, will practically be exclusively higher income individuals. Yes, renting costs more than property tax, but we are talking about taxes. The majority of your rent will not be going back to the government through taxes, but all of your property tax will.

Of course they do this, capital gains is a second tax on money that people already earned. How does this refute what I said?