[Coach]

Originally Posted by HockeyIlliterate

Okay, but what does "more heavily" mean?

And how do you determine who, and under what circumstances, someone should be taxed "more heavily"?

If you're wanting a breakdown by income bracket, I don't really have the time or care to go through the math involved in that haha. What I would say is that, taxing someone to the point that they can be left with an identical lifestyle as if they weren't taxed at all, seems pretty logical to me. How that can be determined is pretty difficult and very abstract because not everyone making the same money lives identical lifestyles. Really the excess of North American society needs a significant drop. This is all idealism for sure, but that doesn't mean it's something we should strive for. Does a person making $1m/year have a remarkably different lifestyle than someone making $10m? Maybe to the point that they might have a bigger house or yacht (both of which are likely far beyond what they actually need), but it's likely not significantly different. I acknowledge that my views on this are pretty radical.

As far as flat tax, looking at who benefits from what, it's just not a feasible solution. To agree with that, you also have to agree that there is a point where people just don't need that much money and should be returning a significant portion to the society. A 10% tax on everyone does not capture this. Someone making $50K who is now at $45K net because of a flat tax, is actually hindered by that. Tax shouldn't be a burden in that way. That extra $5K, which is absolute peanuts in the grand scheme, is a huge loss to someone of that income level. Someone who banked $1m pays $100K in tax. Obviously not a nice number to write over the government, but your still left with $900K in yearly earnings. Is your life different because of that tax? No. It could be argued you could bring that person down to $400-$500K and they still wouldn't feel any ill-effects on their lively hood. A person with $1b/year would pay $100m in tax. Obviously that is a huge number. But it's a number that could build schools and pay for significant infrastructure upgrades, and they are still left with $900m freaking dollars in YEARLY income. If you left a person with $100m in that year, would their life be changed in any significant way?

If we are all in this together, why shouldn't everyone be taxed in the same proportion?

The problem, as I see it, is that I worked very hard to obtain an education that allowed me to get a good paying job, and all the government sees is a "rich" person who needs to pay his "fair share" to, among other things, support those in society who don't pay any federal income taxes now and who seem not to be terribly interested in advancing their lot in life. To say that I need to pay more federal income taxes is ridiculous; my federal income tax bill is already tens of thousands dollars more than my annual living costs are. Which is to say, it costs me more to support the federal government than it does to support my own family.

And it isn't just me. There are many Americans who have worked hard and tried to advance themselves, and one "reward" for doing so is simply more taxes to be paid. And I think it is going to be very difficult to convince these people that they should pay even more in federal income taxes to benefit those who either don't pay anything already or to pay for additional government programs (however well-intentioned they may be) that simply are not cost-sustainable.

I understand this logic to a point, but it's a common point that kind of ticks me off. For every person like you, who worked hard to get through school (lets say law, as I don't know what you do), there is someone who, by all objective accounts, worked just as hard to get a PhD in whatever (lets say, Social Work or Economic Development) but are making far less money because the MARKET determines the majority of your salary, not necessarily how hard you worked to get there. They are paying off the same loans, did the same amount of work (time wise), want to have the same type of family, but because their interest isn't in something lucrative, our society is punishing them by not valuing their field. To say that people like this aren't "terribly interested in advancing their lot" is a pretty ignorant statement to make from the high horse of a well-paid field.

The overall point is that our society, and the resources we deem to be important and income generating, are what pay the majority of your salary, not how hard you worked in school. The different between what you make and what other lawyers make is what you can attribute to your hard work/acumen, not what you make vs a social worker, or even a janitor. Your salary is not necessarily a measure of how hard you work/worked.

Onto the janitor, our society does not provide much in the means of allowing that person to escape that cycle. made some mistakes while younger? Most likely. But now a few years later, they can't just cut and run and go to law school, even if they have the intellectual capacity and the work ethic to do so, they don't have the financial means to put themselves through that type of program. Even worse so if they have a family to support. How come we force this person (or anyone) to go into extreme debt to try and better themselves? Don't you think that is a massive deterrent to do so? Who's to say what these people could do if provided the proper means to educate themselves and explore their talents? What if your education was free? Would you have still pursued what you did, or was it just because it was a money making field? Would your impact on society be greater if you could explore anything you wanted? People would still want to be lawyers and engineers because that's what interests them, and there would be people who enter those programs who otherwise couldn't. Would there be people that take advantage of something like this and be lifetime students? Probably, there will always be people like that regardless. But you can't base policy around the people who may leech off of it. If we did that we wouldn't have the healthcare system we do. AND IMO, the people who make exuberant amounts of money and dodge what they realistically owe back to society through loopholes, personal corporations, and other tax benefits that aren't available to others, are just as much of leeches on the system as people at the other end of the spectrum. But the difference is those people's lost revenue is significant enough that it can actually affect real social problems (lack of proper education for children, poverty, opportunities for people growing up in difficult situations).

A conversation I had with my dad (who is quite wealthy, but not excessively so) over Xmas went like this after discussing similar issues:

Me: Think about it like this Dad, what if, for every $1000 extra you made on top of what you actually need/use, stops a kids from having a proper education, or even a meal on the table?

Dad: Well that wouldn't make me feel good at all.

Me: Well that IS what's happening. Now imagine that $1000 was a number in the billions. Think about the good that could be done with those resources that will other wise sit in bank accounts earning interest at such obscene levels that one monthly dividend off one stock is equal to a very good yearly salary for most people.

Which is why I argue for a federal tax code that is not based on income, but rather on wealth, since income can be "lumpy" and income is not, in my view, a good measure of whether someone is "rich" or "wealthy" or not.

I do agree with this, as someone like yourself might put themselves through school and get a high paying job, and now you're paying a lot of tax, but don't actually have a lot of money in the bank. Maybe it should be based on your income from the last 5 years or something.

Yes, I suppose he is, but I don't think that he has made any donations to the US Treasury to rectify the disparity either.

In fact, isn't he trying to give away a lot of his wealth, and in so doing, depriving the federal government of tax revenue that it might otherwise receive?

Yes he is, but personally, as long as those donations are going to things that most would consider important (children's school charities, healthcare research etc..), because he doesn't beleive the government allocates his tax dollars properly to those things, I'm OK with it. The other argument is that, if people like him DID pay a significant portion of their money in tax, you might not need those types of charities. A bit of a chicken or the egg problem there.

I acknowledge that government has a lot of inefficiencies that could be allocated more effectively, but the government is built by us as a tool for us. If people have problems with how things are run, that's our fault collectively and on us to change it. But how does putting trust in corporations legally bound to drive up profits, and the people who run them, make any more sense? And I also think it's important to acknowledge that a lot of the problems with government exist because of the incredibly wealthy's influence on policies.