Comment by blunte | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blunte | Hacker News Reader

With the growing inequality gap, the US is headed toward its own destruction. Everyone hates taxes, but when those taxes are used reasonably efficiently to make life generally better for most of the population, it's a net gain.

What is the value of being King of the Ghetto? At what point is enough excess enough? At that point, the rest should go back into the community.

I now live in a country on the higher end of the taxation rankings. While I don't enjoy giving up 40% of my income, I do enjoy a lot of benefits (good public transport being the most useful perk for me) that I simply didn't have in the US.

However, I am not going to blame the US entirely for its rising rent problem. Yes a lot of it has been due to the excessive pay of dot.com and other Wall Street windfalls (since when people can afford something they want, they ultimately don't care what the price is... which drives prices up rapidly). However, another major factor is the enormous influx of foreign property purchases. Chinese nationals now own a huge percentage of the properties in the city center. Rental rates are going up at an incredible clip. Unfortunately, rent controls are only a little successful (because people take advantage of that system, just like people do many things to avoid paying taxes).

I really don't see any solution for now. Even providing a living income to all members of society won't prevent some regions having rental rates well beyond what "normal" people can afford. However, try to imagine SF or Manhattan with no low-wage workers. There would be no restaurants, no road repair crews, no public transport drivers, etc. etc. Who would pick up your trash?

> imagine SF or Manhattan with no low-wage workers. There would be no restaurants, no road repair crews, no public transport drivers, etc. etc. Who would pick up your trash?

Rather than subsidizing rich lives with low paid waiters, or somehow taking low-wage workers out of the mix, imagine paying those functions a locally livable wage. Yes, there would be fewer of them, and probably fewer and more expensive restaurants.

But low wage exploitation is not the only way.

Or, if you don't like seeing human tragedy on the streets, you could leave the area. That would tend to depress rent costs, and other costs would follow.

I don't see why you gloss over the "there would be fewer of them" problem with your reasoning. How is this line of thought supposed to move the needle on homelessness in SF? You're expecting them to just go away because they can't find jobs?

I wasn't clear. I'm suggesting that one possible change among many is for the elite to move away, creating less competition for housing, and moving the area back to a livable environment for the average person. Bonus, the departed elite likely won't have to step over sleeping bags wherever they end up. For awhile.

You're basically asking for no new cities to arise. A working theory in this discussion is that SF is NYC 50 years ago. Cities arise through concentration of industry, is that something you just not want to see happening?

It's not binary. This is one possibility among many for someone who doesn't want to experience this.

To me that reads like you're not so much interested in fixing homelessness.

Well we did pretty well after world war 2 with really high taxes on income. I don't know how we'd get back to that, but there are huge pay offs in investing in things like child nutrition and headstart programs, these have been shown to reduce later criminal behavior and increase median income.

Anyway, toyko is a good place to look for how to keep house prices low. https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottbeyer/2016/08/12/tokyos-af...

Well, we'd reintroduce massive tax loopholes that allow for real tax rates to be less than they currently are - that's how we'd get back to that, because that's what we had then. We'd also cut payroll taxes back to 3% and have them apply to the first 30,000 instead of over 6% and applying to the first 106k of income.

We'd also raise taxes on the poorest quintile - you know, the people that currently don't pay any, and repeal medicare taxes.

That'd pretty much get us back to post ww2 taxes.

Given inflation, it seems like payroll taxes have fallen. 30k is (per https://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php?amount=3...) $397,964.84 dollars.

I'd suggest looking at the following for a reasonably good look on the progressive tax rate, historically.

http://www.teachinghistory.org/history-content/ask-a-histori...

US government spends 37.6% of GDP across all it's layers which is well above Switzerland's 33.9% by comparison, thus the US has and needs high tax rates. https://data.oecd.org/gga/general-government-spending.htm

The difference is our tax code is designed to hide just how much money people are actually paying. Inefficiency and corruption also drastically reduces the benefits people get from the government. https://b-i.forbesimg.com/theapothecary/files/2013/06/OECD-P...

EX: US government spends 3,967$ per person (2010) on healthcare and has massive issues. Switzerland spends less than 1/2 as much at 1,628$/person (2010) and has high quality universal healthcare.

We pay a great deal of money for the military, and healthcare.

https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bud...

We also overpay significantly for the healthcare we get compared to similar developed countries, and have worse outcomes.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/danmunro/2014/06/16/u-s-healthc...

Given how much gun violence is blamed on mental health issues (though if that was the issue, you'd have to assume americans have more mental health issues than other developed countries, considering we have more gun deaths per capita, but I digress) and given the national emergency of the opiod epidemic, maybe we'll see some money go towards mental health that might help the people on the street, but I somehow doubt it.

If you live in California once you hit 91k you will start paying 45% in taxes ( 28% Federal, 9.3% State , 7.6 OASDI) So clearly you are advocating a decrease in taxes since from your experience you can get taxed less and still have better services the you get in San Fransisco

it really depends on the tax steps, it's quite likely they'd pay less taxes in the US cause the higher rates kick in later (and hit 40% in their host country long before reaching $91k).

E.g. in Germany you would already reach 47.5% (42% income tax + 5.5% solidarity surcharge) as a single person at €52k.

You can't compare absolute incomes. $52K in Germany is probably equivalent to $100K in the US, if you take into account that you don't have to pay $250K/child in college tuition, $25K/year in health care premiums, etc. You can think of these as taxes, because that's how you pay for these in Germany.

Also, the "US has low taxes" mantra is a bit of a myth.

Please add:

- State taxes (usually 6-8%) on top of federal taxes.

- Real estate taxes - in a major metropolitan area in NE US, you pay $12K/year for an average house in a decent (but not top) neighborhood.

- Excise taxes - for every car/boat you own.

- Taxes on every almost every service - cable/Internet, land/cell phone (FCC), airline tickets (FAA), etc.

We also get very low return on our money, paying twice as much for everything (education and healthcare in particular) and getting lower quality in return, compared to Europe.

This is exactly my point. Paying "high" taxes if you're getting something good for your money can be worth doing.

Call me a pacifist, but I don't like paying taxes for military equipment that the military leaders themselves have said is not useful for them. But Congress keeps doing it because Boeing and Lockheed keep paying them to do it. I would MUCH rather a good percent of my "defense contribution" go toward lowering education costs for ALL Americans.

Regarding all the taxes you mention, those really are regressive taxes. They make up a greater percentage of poor people's incomes than they do rich people's. Back when gas in the US was over $4/gal, the poor people suffered immensely. The rich people already were able to choose Tahoes with 13mpg and not care, so the extra gasoline bill was not something that affected them. But poor people suddenly had to choose whether they drove to work (to earn minimum wage), or whether they replaced a shoe with a hole in it.

I firmly believe that the reason we get less quality in return for our taxes is because of the absolute corporate control over the majority of Congress. And since elections are driven almost entirely by money, to win a seat you have to accept corporate money and then return the favor (else you're out next election).

Is that 45% marginal? Because the post you reply to talks about 40% of their income i.e. not the marginal rate.

I sometimes wonder if it would substantially change the tax conversation if everyone understood what a marginal tax rate was.

It is both, the Federal rate of 28% starts at 91k, but 25% starts at 31k. Since California starts their 9% tax at 51k I can change my comment to be that those making 51k get taxed at 41%. Even with a "progressive" tax system you are still paying more taxes then people assume.

I bring this whole thing up not because I don't understand marginal tax rates, but because the issue isn't "tax brackets" or marginal tax rates, but its deductions and other loopholes that allow people to pay far less then that in "effective tax rates". Lets not even get into the spending side of things and how much waste there is in the system that effectively funnels those funds to a federal contractors.

People have extremely naive perceptions of how taxes are used. It shocks me. The "throw tax money at it" attitude towards problems, especially in cities where people are reasonably wealthy, is very lazy.

This California tax predictor suggests a single person earning 51K will pay 40.65% marginal income tax rate, 22.5% effective income tax and only 29% effective including sales, fuel and property tax.

https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-tax-calculator#8x5pQ...

Looking solely at the tax bracket is a little deceptive. In reality, with a $92k income, you'll pay:

- $17196.25 Federal tax (https://www.irs.com/articles/2016-federal-tax-rates-personal... with standard deduction)

- $5518.58 California state tax (https://www.ftb.ca.gov/forms/2017-California-Tax-Rates-and-E... Schedule X, with standard deduction applied)

- $7038 for OASDI

So you actually pay 19% federal, 6% state and 7.65% OASDI, for a total of 32.65%.

It's still bad but not 45%.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com