No Stupid Questions

IMO the most valid argument is that there are way more people making a middling income than people making a high income, so any reduction in taxes for those people would need a proportionally much larger increase in the upper brackets to maintain the same level of tax revenue, if it's possible to make the numbers work at all depending on how much of a tax break you want to give. The minimum amount to be taxed is set based on where the tail end of the bell curve is, the number of people who are poor enough not to be taxed is small.

Of course there's also the fact that the richest people don't get their money from having a job at all, it's all in investments, so messing with income tax rates doesn't even affect them.

The standard deduction should be at least the median income…? Wouldn’t that mean that half of people would pay no income tax?

You might say this is what we should do, but I think it’s far from obvious.

If you earn $40k and the first $13k is untaxed, then you’re paying no taxes on about the first third of your income. And from there you begin paying in the lowest bracket.

If you make $100k, and the first $13k is untaxed, that’s the first 13% of your income, not 33%. And some of your income will be taxed at levels higher than anything the $40k earner pays. I just fail to see how this is placing the burden on the poor. It Is structured to do the exact opposite and give them the most breaks.

The fact that there’s one standard deduction for the whole country is insane, since $13k means something extremely different in different places.

But across the board I’d probably agree that the floor on the deduction should come up, and we should raise taxes on extreme wealth to make it up. But at least in its most essential form, income tax is already progressive.

So I don’t really get your question. But who am I fooling? I’m going to be downvoted into oblivion for going against the popular narrative on this.

Incompetence at being selfish.

They think they're being selfish, but they fucking suck at it. They think selfish means "I don't want to pay taxes but fuck you you still have to pay I win you lose".

If they were even slightly competent at being selfish, they'd realize in about three seconds that doing things that way makes your town (and more) stressed out and shitty, and you still have to live there, and you can only build walls so high.

And even if we got rid of physics so you could build impossibly tall walls, now you've definitely lost because you had to build them in the first place, instead of being even remotely sensible and building a world where your neighbor would be happy to see you, or thrive peacefully and leave you be.

The "economics" of it are mostly about couching this damning and embarrassing realization in big words so that everybody stops paying attention because they yawned and lost interest.

If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.

-Lyndon B. Johnson

20 years ago, the right wing propaganda machine was focused on (before they went full out fascist) low taxes for the "job creators" such as corporations and rich people, on the basis of that leading to more lucrative job opportunities for everyone else. The thinking was that the people and corporations in this low-tax environment would have incentives for creating jobs "here" instead of moving them overseas.

Not everyone on that side of the isle have realized that this results in jobs still ending up overseas, along with money that could've funded schools, roads, libraries, et al. And many of those who have realized it continue along the same path because it's too profitable for them to do so.

Remember this next time you hear slogans such as "trickle down economy", or Glitch McConnells favorite: "What's good for the goose is good for the gander".

Because fucking over the poor is how the rich stay rich.

This is political science 101

Just from a game theory perspective, a distributed group of people who are unorganized are unable to get their concerns addressed properly when it comes time to writing tax laws.

The rich and powerful, by virtue of being rich and powerful, have a voice in writing the tax laws. The distributed poor, do not. So it's much easier to satisfy income goals by taxing the group who has no feedback loop to the politicians

It's the same as in every business: those making decisions think that the decision making is the hardest and most important part of the equation. Not only that, they believe that it is their right and that they worked very hard to get where they are.

There are two reasons they have to believe that:

1. if they didn't, they'd feel that they didn't deserve it
2. it also explains (to them at least) why there is inequality

The common argument that is brought up against change now is capital flight: "if businesses and rich people were taxed too much, they'd leave the country". There is a great fear that they will leave and take all the good jobs with them. The counter argument to that is: they aren't the only ones with brains to get a business going. Rich people aren't smarter than non-rich people, businesses that leave did employ people from whence they left and they also probably sold to the people in that area or country.

Now, of course the speed of departure, the political reaction, and the location are important.

Speed: instant departure can have a serious impact as the jobless might not be able to find other employment quickly. A graduated departure allows that however and also makes it possible for people to focus on other jobs/specialisations in the first place.

Political reaction: depending on where you are, providing recertification and training courses, having good welfare programs, and most importantly having an exit tax can help soften the blow of departure

Location: A big employer leaving a small town can be devastating. A small employer leaving a city, less so. A big employer leaving a city can burden the city, but the other factors are important.

The isn't snark. The answer is simply greed. The rich want to be richer. They want it all. The mentality is, "I don't care about anyone else, I want it all."

Edit: removed a redundant sentence

Rich people have special access to the legislative machinery that you and I don't. Through ~~bribes~~ "contributions" they can craft laws that let them avoid paying their fair share of the tax burden. They can also "modify" pending legislation to remove the penalties for breaking those laws. It must be nice to live in a consequence-free environment.

Mathematics and Politics.

There are many more people who are "working class" than rich. The argument is that if you take some money from a lot of people, you get more money than if you take a lot of money from some people.

There's also the argument that if everyone pitches in, the overall burden for each individual is less.

What this fails to address is that the richer you are, the more you can play with your money and end up with nothing to tax. This is why the rich get richer and the rest of us don't.

Running through all that is a thing called "trickle down economics" which claims that the money from the rich ends up in society, but recent reviews of this have proven this to be nonsense. Politicians use this as an argument for the status quo.

Finally, the rich shape the narrative. Politicians are essentially elected by the rich through their manipulation of the story through their media empires and social media platforms.

I often wonder this myself. Why do rich people, who have so much wealth that it is unimaginable to us, not want to pay any taxes? It hampers the economy, makes it less adaptable to contractions, and makes the lives of the vast majority of the population much more difficult. At a macro level, I really don't see any benefits to it. So, here's my best guess.

• Power & control. A poor and uneducated population is much easier to control than a financially stable and educated population. If people are fighting each other for survival and minimal luxuries, then they can't organize to improve their lives as a whole. Add to that being uneducated, they get their "education" via the media and are easily manipulated via propaganda.
• Strength. Similarly, they want to feel strong by manipulating the system to get what they want. By getting the government to do what they want and finding loopholes to reduce their burden, they feel stronger than others. This gives them a sense of strength that they seek, which ultimately means safety for them.
• Greed. They just want the numbers on their bank statements to be higher. Some people are proud of numbers, so the larger the number, the more proud they are. It doesn't matter if the number is relative, so the value doesn't really have any practical impact on their lives. They just want a larger number. I swear, sometimes we should just print fake bank statements wich ridiculous numbers, give them to the wealthy, and congratulate them. That's what they want: to be envied.
• Lack of care. They literally do not care about others. It's not even an issue that fits in their heads. Find someone that is politically right-leaning and ask them what they think about the economic situation in a poor and war torn country. Their response would be indictive of how the wealthy think about us.
• Narrow & short sighted. They can't see the whole picture. They're focused solely on their own relative position on the hierarchy and can't consider how their desires will impact the whole system in the long-term. They can't see that if the lower classes are complacent and uneducated, their products and creativity suffer. Look at Russia where people contribute just enough to get paid and all creativity is to please the elites. This stifles academic and scientific progress while also damaging integrity. People don't contribute to the economy because they have a personal drive. They contribute to please their superiors. This results in a terrible economy full of corruption and lack of ingenuity. The wealthy can't see that because they don't care about it. They just want to feel strong and in control.

It's very clear to me that everyone substantially richer than me should be paying the taxes, and everyone else and I should pay no taxes.

This attitude works pretty well at all but the very highest income levels.

There are a lot more poor people than there are rich people. It's a game of numbers, and a slight increase on the middle class would often bring in more money than a substantial increase on the top percent.

Rich people also have a lot more loopholes they can abuse to pay less in taxes. Closing these loopholes could also potentially/occasionally disproportionately hurt lower or middle class people. They are possible to close, but (A) there's always more to find, and (B) lobbying means there could be political incentives to not close them.

There's also the arguments about raising taxes leading to innovation stagnating, or rich people moving to countries with lower tax rates. I'm not sure how much I buy those arguments.

That said, I'm not condoning these. In my country, I think we need to introduce more tax brackets. A doctor making less than $300,000/yr shouldn't be in the same tax bracket as a CEO making an over $800,000/yr salary before bonuses. But they are in the same tax bracket. That doesn't feel right to me.

I'm pretty sure their argument is "because fuck everyone but us who can decide that."

Its basic selfishness that people seem to not grow out of. Even the poorer class act selfishly so there is no difference when they are rich.

So the richer you get the less you want to contribute to gov programs and what not. Its always the “why would i want to give money to a gov that doesnt know how to use it? Or why is it my problem to help people who are lazy?” They are seemingly reasonable arguments but actually are immature

Don't be fooled, taxes are just a way to extract the fruit of the poor folks' labor and give it to the rich and powerful. Always have been, since their inception. Not just in America, here in the (highly idealized by lemmy) EU I cost my company 3200€ a month, 1850€ go to my bank account and 1350€ to the government, plus up to a 21% vat from the things I purchase. Amazon pays literally 0€ in taxes.

Lord Sauron is a simple working class person just like you and me. He received the diamond mines from his father only after he had proven himself. He knows what is best for all of us.

There are many and they're all bad.

You didn't tell us what you meant by "shoulder the burden". Maybe you should have, or at least if you did it would allow more focused answers.

Some people that I have spoken with are fans of a flat tax. They think that income tax should be 10% on everyone, no matter what. They think that is fair.

In order to maintain that belief in fairness, they also need to magically forget about: the ultra rich, passive income, capital gains, the existence of businesses that have a different tax code, and the fact that they probably actually endorse various tax breaks.

On a side note, I think one of the underlying causes of people being willing to try to forget all of these obvious facts of life is the gut assumption that big banks and ultra rich people who are running scams or finding loopholes are doing so in a very complicated way, so there's no chance we could figure out what's happening and stop it. But what forensic accountants point out from time to time is that many of the scams and loopholes are new variations on old tricks. We can understand how they work, but it takes effort, because the names change and the money moves in slightly different ways.