Comment by rustynails | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rustynails | Hacker News Reader

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The article is reasonable in the scope it addresses. It's ok for some to be richer than others. We get it. Where it's not fair is that the system is rigged (as other commenters have said). I'm very surprised it's missing from the article.

Maybe, the author should talk about inequality of taxation and the good old Dutch Sandwich. No, the top 1% don't play fair or even remotely pay fair taxes. Pick the top 100 on NASDAQ. I'll almost guarantee they pay less than 10% tax.

If you addressed taxation, you'd eliminate almost all valid criticisms. There'd still be outsourcing, legal system bias (eg. White collar crime such as the GFC where there was little or no accountability) and monopolistic issues, but tax was meant to be the great liberator.

I'm curious why the author skipped the Dutch Sandwich and tax rate paid by the top 1%.

The so-called Dutch Sandwich exists because the United States is the only country in the world to practice worldwide-basis taxation. In any other country, that income would not be taxable at all. Which is not to say that there are no issues with correctly attributing corporate income to the countries in which it occurs, but figuring out which governments are entitled to which corporate income is a fantastically complicated question without clear answers. It's certainly not obviously the case that the United States government deserves a share.

And even if some super rich guy has a tax rate lower than 10% measured in absolute dollars he probably still pays much more than you or I. I have yet to see any kind of justification that percentage based taxation without getting more in return when you pay more (in absolute dollars) is fair in the first place - even though somehow everybody seems to believe that.

Despite the difficulty in norming on fairness, the arguments I've seen put forward are:

1) The progressive taxation stance suggests that since you're taxing the rich higher rates for money with less utility, that tax is less burdensome, so everyone is experiencing a similar or fair level of inconvenience or economic pain from the tax.

2) The disproportionate benefit stance suggests the rich should pay more because they receive a disproportionate benefit from the state through its investments in protecting their wealth, deploying the infrastructure that the rich need to get richer, negotiating trade agreements, and providing tax relief deemed corporate welfare.

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