The Wealthy need to pay their fair share!

[narwhalParticipant]

The next time you hear someone say that the wealthy need to pay their fair share, ask them.

1 – How much money is the wealthy’s fair share? How much should they pay?

2- What % of income tax comes from the wealthy right now?

3 – What should be the fair share of those that are not wealthy? How much do they actually pay?

4 – Why is fair share defined by how much money you earned instead of how much government resources you use?

5 – If you believe the wealthy aren’t paying their fair share, yet can’t answer the questions above, what conclusions should be drawn about your opinion?

Top 1% income taxes

Clinton and Fair Share

I heard this discussed on a radio program last night. I was vaguely aware of percentages and such, but never looked at the details.

I’ve always wondered about question #4. Can you imagine going to a car dealership and being told the price was dependent on how much money you earn, not the quality of the car you were buying? Would you call that fair?

Ok. Then do it.

[BeerParticipant 11832]

What I’ve noticed about “fair” when it comes to the government is most people’s version of fair is what allows them to pay the least in and get the most benefits. For example…a coworker was talking recently about how he thought universal healthcare would be the most fair healthcare system because we all get equal treatment. I said to him…we make the same amount of money, so we’d pay the same amount of taxes into whatever universal healthcare system they come up with, only I’m a single guy with no kids, and you have 3 kids and a stay at home wife…how is it fair that my coverage would cost 5x as much as it would cost for any single member of your family?

narwhal wrote:

I’ve always wondered about question #4. Can you imagine going to a car dealership and being told the price was dependent on how much money you earn, not the quality of the car you were buying? Would you call that fair?

Problem is though, if they made taxes so maybe everyone paid 30k a year regardless of income, you’d get people who’d just say f~~~ it and not even bother working because so much of their income would end up going to the government they couldn’t afford to feed themselves or keep a roof over their head.

If you tried to charge people based upon what they use…what are you going to do charge the poor for assistance they get when they are on assistance because they don’t have money to begin with? Don’t get me wrong I think our welfare system is bloated and full of fraud and corruption, but at the same time you can’t exactly squeeze blood from a stone either.

The only system that is viable is those who make more paying more. I honestly don’t have a problem with that. The only thing that really p~~~es me off about the current system is how many people pay nothing, and how you can get a Warren Buffet paying an effective tax rate around 17% because all his income is capital gains while middle class people are paying in the ball park of 30%.

If I could re-write the system I’d just get rid pretty much all write offs and deductions and all the bulls~~~ ways the government uses the tax code for social engineering purposes. The standard deduction would be based off the poverty line…maybe 2x or something, and beyond that we’d all pay maybe 20% or 25% of our income regardless of if it comes from capital gains or payroll. It would be worth it for lower income people to actually go to work and we might get some of the 50% who pay no taxes right now actually putting a little money in(it wouldn’t be a ton but they’d have enough to survive on if 2x the poverty line was tax free and they might stop voting for “free s~~~” when they see a little actually coming out of their pocket rather than the s~~~ that goes on now where people work part time then cash in on tax credits during tax season and make more off the government then they made working), the rich wouldn’t get soaked with some astronomical tax rate like a lot of people want to see, and the middle class wouldn’t be paying higher effective tax rates than the rich like we do now.

[Anonymous 24]

F~~~ this fair share s~~~ argument everyone is at each other’s throats over. How about we reduce the size of government to a more manageable beast instead of f~~~ing around everywhere worldwide, nonstop, on my dime, and not for my benefit.

[narwhalParticipant]

Beer wrote:

Problem is though, if they made taxes so maybe everyone paid 30k a year regardless of income, you’d get people who’d just say f~~~ it and not even bother working because so much of their income would end up going to the government they couldn’t afford to feed themselves or keep a roof over their head.
If you tried to charge people based upon what they use…what are you going to do charge the poor for assistance they get when they are on assistance because they don’t have money to begin with? Don’t get me wrong I think our welfare system is bloated and full of fraud and corruption, but at the same time you can’t exactly squeeze blood from a stone either.
The only system that is viable is those who make more paying more. I honestly don’t have a problem with that.

Yes, I agree that in some regards, that’s the only viable system, but in no way should the system be labeled fair. That’s the biggest problem I have. The population is brainwashed into believe those that have are some how more obligated then those that have not.

Beer wrote:

The only thing that really p~~~es me off about the current system is how many people pay nothing, and how you can get a Warren Buffet paying an effective tax rate around 17% because all his income is capital gains while middle class people are paying in the ball park of 30%.

Can you explain why this p~~~es you off? We are talking about rates here, not actual dollars. Warren Buffet’s 17% amounts to several million, while a middle class person’s 30% is several thousand. Personally, I am bothered that people who pay no taxes and are unappreciative of those that do. P~~~ed off at the rich, not so much.

We tax the way we do because of the thought that the rich can afford to pay more while having less impact on their lives and on the economy. It has nothing to do with fairness.

Ok. Then do it.

[narwhalParticipant]

Anonymous wrote:

F~~~ this fair share s~~~ argument everyone is at each other’s throats over. How about we reduce the size of government to a more manageable beast instead of f~~~ing around everywhere worldwide, nonstop, on my dime, and not for my benefit.

Related, but separate issue.

Ok. Then do it.

[TaxGuyParticipant]

Beer wrote:

If I could re-write the system I’d just get rid pretty much all write offs and deductions and all the bulls~~~ ways the government uses the tax code for social engineering purposes. The standard deduction would be based off the poverty line…maybe 2x or something, and beyond that we’d all pay maybe 20% or 25% of our income regardless of if it comes from capital gains or payroll. It would be worth it for lower income people to actually go to work and we might get some of the 50% who pay no taxes right now actually putting a little money in(it wouldn’t be a ton but they’d have enough to survive on if 2x the poverty line was tax free and they might stop voting for “free s~~~” when they see a little actually coming out of their pocket rather than the s~~~ that goes on now where people work part time then cash in on tax credits during tax season and make more off the government then they made working), the rich wouldn’t get soaked with some astronomical tax rate like a lot of people want to see, and the middle class wouldn’t be paying higher effective tax rates than the rich like we do now.

You could do away with a lot of the “unfairness” in the tax code right now if you just didn’t let companies or people with rental properties depreciate the buildings. If you take the example of a guy with a rental property, he may have mortgage, taxes, insurance, etc. of $1,500 a month. He’s charging $1,700 a month in rent so he’s cash positive $200 per month, or $2,400 for the year. Let’s say he paid $250k for a house, $50 is land and $200k is house. That house will generate almost $7,200 a year in deprecation ($200,000 divided by 27.5 years). Now he has a taxable loss of $4,800. If your combined federal and state income tax rate is 30% (and that’s low), you just saved $1,440 in taxes. Now you are cash positive for the year by $2,400+1,440= $3,840.

Now throw a couple more zeroes on the end of that and you can see how it can add up. And as long as you don’t sell the property you never have to recapture that depreciation. You can take your basis all of the way down to $50k, the original price of the land. Now, when you sell, you only “paid” $50k for the place because you deducted the rest of it, so even if you “break even” at $250k sales price, you will owe tax on $200k. It’s a “deferral” of taxes, but you get to decide how long you defer it. Because you don’t owe the tax until you sell.

The IRS is allowing a depreciation deduction on an asset that typically goes up in value. If they just stopped letting you do that you would fix a lot of the problems.

Don’t get me wrong though, this is only solving one issue. But it’s probably one of the most “unfair” things in the tax code.

Order the good wine

[Anonymous 42]

The supper wealthy are the only ones left that have any “shares”, what we’re witnessing are barbarians at the gate looking to destroy any and all forms of wealth!

The barbarian’s name is “Equality”, she gets her power through the iron fist gynocentric government.

[PistolPeteParticipant 27143]

Next time someone tries that fair share bit on you remind them that the people in the top 15% of income pay 95% of the taxes. If you earn more than 80K a year you’re in the top 15%.

[Jan SobieskiParticipant 28791]

Life ain’t fair, get over it.

Learn to be happy with what you have.

Less is more. Happiness comes from within.

Love is just alimony waiting to happen. Visit mgtow.com.

[Nathan R. JessepParticipant 1102]

Jan Sobieski wrote:

Life ain’t fair, get over it.

Learn to be happy with what you have.

Less is more. Happiness comes from within.

Exactly, so you if you make more money and get taxed at a higher rate be happy about it.

[The Missing ManSpectator 342]

Amongst my several fantasies of the Grand liberation of the World, I would find it most pleasing if all the wealthy in the nation just got all their money in cash and burned it.

I am not against having wealth but in today’s world what substance does it hold any more?

Would you rather be given one billion dollars or have the skill worth one billion dollars?

As it’s been said life isn’t fair, I disagree life is about as fair as you make it for yourself.

The general population of the world still thinks it’s in Pre-K and therefore everything must be wilfully given to them.

[uchibenkeiParticipant 7965]

it’s not so simple to calculate how much national services and assets you are using. Look at the roads, airports, seaports, train infrastructure, etc. Those are primarily used for businesses to transport goods. In other words, primarily for the wealthy to transport their goods for sale and facilitate business. The poor don’t really use that. Military is off protecting national business interests but not for the poor. The poor don’t have any rights to oil, gold or whatever other resources are being “protected”. Oh but i guess military is really protecting your “freedom”. lol. Schools are meant to produce good employees, not intelligent and free thinking people. Tax breaks and incentives to get corporations to expand into the state/country, etc. Fire departments prisons and police departments primary job is to protect assets. the more wealth you have, the more protective services you are using. When you look at things this way, you start to see that while the wealthy like to think they don’t use national services and assets, they do quite a bit. It’s just the social safety net they don’t use. So really, how do you calculate the amount of benefit you are receiving from the government or country?

I bathe in the tears of single moms.

[Nathan R. JessepParticipant 1102]

I live in a very wealthy part of Los Angeles and I see massive wealth all around me – people in multi-million dollar houses, driving $100+ cars, more money than they can actually spend so they waste it on $5k handbags and $20k sofas – and hate hearing the ‘my taxes are too high’ complaints from them. I’ve traveled around the world to places where they either have a corrupt taxation system (you can easily bride officials to avoid jail) or no progressive taxation and they are awful places to live for the wealthy and poor alike.

[narwhalParticipant]

Jan Sobieski wrote:

Life ain’t fair, get over it.
Learn to be happy with what you have.

This isn’t about my taxes. This about others complaining that someone else isn’t paying their fair share while knowing idea what that even means.

The Missing Man wrote:

Would you rather be given one billion dollars or have the skill worth one billion dollars?

I’d rather have a billion dollars.

uchibenkei wrote:

it’s not so simple to calculate how much national services and assets you are using. Look at the roads, airports, seaports, train infrastructure, etc. Those are primarily used for businesses to transport goods. In other words, primarily for the wealthy to transport their goods for sale and facilitate business. The poor don’t really use that.

I disagree. Well, I agree that it’s hard to calculate, but I don’t agree about the assumption that corporations = wealthy, and that the poor don’t use resources. Corporations are made up of a lot more then just the wealthy. Even then, following your argument, wouldn’t it make more sense to increase taxes on corporations then on the wealthy individual.

As far as the poor not using resources much resources, they absolutely do. Even if they don’t own car, they are consuming the resource corporations generate and transport. If the transportation infrastructure is not there, those good become much more expense if available at all.

Nathan R. Jessep wrote:

I live in a very wealthy part of Los Angeles and I see massive wealth all around me – people in multi-million dollar houses, driving $100+ cars, more money than they can actually spend so they waste it on $5k handbags and $20k sofas – and hate hearing the ‘my taxes are too high’ complaints from them. I’ve traveled around the world to places where they either have a corrupt taxation system (you can easily bride officials to avoid jail) or no progressive taxation and they are awful places to live for the wealthy and poor alike.

Understood. I’m not saying the wealthy need to pay more or less, and we certainly have it better then many countries out there. However, the liberal claim that the wealthy don’t pay their fair share makes no sense whatsoever. It’s feed to us without misleading statements about tax rates and loopholes without any consideration of the real dollars or how tax money is utilized.

Ok. Then do it.

[BeerParticipant 11832]

narwhal wrote:

Can you explain why this p~~~es you off?

Simple…like I already said a % tax is the only viable way…if we had a tax that amounted to a flat dollar amount it just wouldn’t work. As long as tax is a % I think we should all pay roughly the same %. I don’t see why some guy making a million a year should pay 40% while some guy making 50k pays 20%…so naturally I also don’t think some guy making 50k a year should pay 40% while some guy making a million a year pays 20%.

So I found this corny graph, and basically what I’m saying is I think the green line is the most fair.

I think a progressive tax needlessly punishes hard work and success, while a regressive tax is just needlessly punishing to lower income earners. Its just a cheap graph I found…but if you started to plug actual numbers in, in order to make the regressive tax work the yellow line would have to start off the highest…seems kind of dumb to tax low income people so hard its not even worth it for them to work, or would just force them right on to assistance programs, so whats the point?

narwhal wrote:

Personally, I am bothered that people who pay no taxes and are unappreciative of those that do. P~~~ed off at the rich, not so much.

Yeah I agree…I think that needs addressed as well…I think a large part of the problem with our system is we basically subsidize and reward poor choices. That needs to end. I also recognize though you really aren’t going to get all that much tax money out of someone living paycheck to paycheck working a 20,000 a year retail job. Like I said it would make more sense to me to just have a larger standard deduction…let the working poor basically pay no taxes, and not have them on welfare, then force them to pay taxes just to redistribute welfare funds to them.

Basically the welfare queen with 4 kids who pops out number 5 then complains her welfare money isn’t generous enough is a worthless sack of s~~~ that should be run over by a steam roller…kinda like this lady…

The low wage earner who maybe just had s~~~ty luck in the job market or whatever who goes to work and wants to be self sufficient…I’m ok with these people paying little to no taxes when they are barely scraping by anyhow and at least aren’t sitting there with their hand out expecting free s~~~.

narwhal wrote:

This isn’t about my taxes. This about others complaining that someone else isn’t paying their fair share while knowing idea what that even means.

What is “fair” that actually works though? Its just not possible to have the bottom 50% pay 50% of the taxes and the top 50% pay 50% of the taxes…you’d end up with people making 30k a year getting a 100k tax bill. What’s the alternative? I’m just saying if the top 10% have 90% of the income and they pay 90% of the taxes…I’m quite alright with that, more so than that same top 10% having 90% of the income and paying 60% of the taxes, or having 90% of the income and paying 98% of taxes.

With that being said I’m pretty libertarian leaning on a lot of things. The idea out there that a 39.6% federal tax bracket isn’t high enough absolutely disgusts me, our constant deficits and ever growing debt disgusts me, and I think we should balance our budget and trim down the size and cost of our government significantly.

narwhal wrote:

Even then, following your argument, wouldn’t it make more sense to increase taxes on corporations then on the wealthy individual.

This is another thing I’d disagree with a lot of people on as well. Our corporate taxes should be 0. We’re in a global economy now…we should do everything we can to get businesses to build and invest here. As long as they are doing that we shouldn’t hammer them in taxes. The government is going to to get its taxes when the company is paying out to its employees and paying out bonuses and dividends. Sooner or later companies will all do this…they’ll only sit on so much cash before its going to be reinvested in the company or dispensed in some way to its shareholders/owners/employees.

Just an example…GE used to have a large presence in my state. Our moronic governor decided to raise corporate taxes. The next state over said they’d give GE a tax break. GE said ok, and is in the process of moving one state over and saving tons of money in taxes. Now what does my state get? They get nothing from GE, many well paid employees are moving along with GE so now the state gets nothing from any of those people, and who knows how many other smaller businesses are going to be losing customers as the area just lost a large chunk of well paid people, and those other businesses will end up laying some off or closing as well. Just totally fabricated numbers here…but in essence its like the governor here said +10 million a year from you isn’t enough, I want +12 million, and instead he ended up with -3 million.

The same thing is happening on an international scale as well…only instead of from state to state companies just pack their s~~~ and move to a different country. Plus our whole corporate tax system is f~~~ed out of its mind and corrupt anyhow…companies with good accountants, lawyers, and well placed political contributions seem to very often be able to skirt tax laws and pay much lower rates than your local small business, all so they can pay out stock bonuses to the higher ups…and oh yeah…those stock bonuses are taxed at a much lower rate than what Bob working in the engineering department gets hammered for in his paycheck.

[RusskyParticipant 13503]

If I was an evil Machiavellian genius and I had to come up with ways to skim the cream off people’s incomes and make them love it, here’s what I would do:

1) overtake printing presses to loan money to the government on interest and call it “Federal Reserve” so people would think it’s legit because it has a governmental-looking building and has the word “Federal” in the name
2) Impose tax to fund a “just” war that has backing of the vast majority, and keep it after the war is over – “to rebuild and defend the country”
3) Engineer such witholding system, that most people would receive refunds after filing – this will make them associate taxation with something rewarding
4) Circumvent the constitution by making it voluntary so people would forget it was voluntary after paying them for three generations
5) Run negative budgets to make sure there is so much debt that all income tax collections go straight to owners of “Federal” Reserve as “interest”, while sheeple think they’re still paying for defence, social services and infrastructure
6) Make tax code so complicated, that anybody could be found at fault to enable selective prosecution
7) Make sure that tax rate is disproportional, so those who are taxed the most would demand “justice” by raising taxes on those who are taxed at a lesser rate or exempt completely.

This way we arrive at the curious system, where the robbery victims surrender the loot voluntarily, assume that the robbers use the loot for victims’ benefit, associate the robbery with reward (“refund”), and demand that robbers would rob more from those who “didn’t pay their fair share”

proud carrier of the 'why?' chromosome

[AntipathyParticipant 4901]

narwhal wrote:

I’ve always wondered about question #4. Can you imagine going to a car dealership and being told the price was dependent on how much money you earn, not the quality of the car you were buying? Would you call that fair?

In Finland, speeding tickets are based on income.

I used to be for socialism, until i realized who benefits from it, and who pays for it. Mainly hard working men pay for it, and mostly lazy single mothers, and immigrants who refuse to work, rake in all the benefits. I have since taken on a more libertarian view.

[Author]

Posts