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Originally Posted by ThePrince
Using wrong numbers in hyperbole doesn't really help drive your point home.
Firstly, his "middle class workers" aren't paying 30-40% tax. In Alberta, effective tax rate on $75k/year income is 25%. In Washington state (where Amazon is headquartered), it's more like 20%.
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Isolating numbers to suit your narrative isn’t helping to drive your point home either.
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Secondly, everyone always spouts off the tax rate percentages of the rich and never mentions the proportion of absolute tax they actually pay. I'll give you a couple of examples: in the US, the top 50% of income earners pay 97% of the personal income taxes. That means that half of the population effectively contributes nothing to taxes. In Canada, the top 40% of income earners pay about 85% of the tax, while earning 72% of the income.
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Funny how they pay so much more in tax yet somehow their earnings growth is still managing to outpace the lower earners by leaps and bounds.
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I know it's easy to have the populist opinion of "tax the rich" because it's easy to pinpoint a group of people and say that they're the problem. By no means am I saying they shouldn't contribute more. I would happily pay more tax - my problem with it is that I believe the government is terrible at spending my money. It's bureaucratic, inefficient, and a lot of that money gets needlessly wasted, so I have zero confidence that extra tax paid would do much to measurably improve our quality of lives.
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Governments may waste money, as does private industry, but I’m still willing to bet they could have managed to pay for some hospitals or universal healthcare programs with the money that Jeff Bezos spent on his fly his ego to space vanity project. Are you sure it’s everyone else’s quality of life you’re looking out for?