so many of the people I speak with who either go to or went to Berkeley support raising taxes.
They think if the government is better funded, it can provide more social good.
But now that it's actually happening to them, there's this massive pushback.
I don't know if this tax bill will be beneficial or not, I'm a coder, not an economist, but I do think there's just a bit of irony happening with this proposed tax increase.
The sensible way to eliminate the special tax treatment would be to first change how the university does the accounting, so that a bunch of stuff that the university does for university purposes doesn't get imputed to the student as income.
I would be in favor of collecting enough money to start paying down the national debt. But, only if that money is collected evenly across the tax base not simply shifted to tiny sub groups.
When you're in the Bay Area and your students can choose to work for the University or go get a paid internship down the road, you have to compete on wages.
You can argue that the government is bad at spending that money, but this is a completely separate complaint.
Also the argument that the government is bad at spending money is exactly the point. I would possibly be supportive of higher taxes if I thought the money would be used to pay for useful things.
And the complaint is that this particular plan will let the rich pay less, not that the rich should pay more.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/45-of-americans-pay-no-fed...
Even with a moderately regressive income tax the rich will be paying more total tax even though they are paying a smaller percentage of their income as tax. Therefore you can not make any conclusions about the fairness of a tax by saying that the top 20% of earners pay 80% of the total amount of income tax (it would have been absolutely crazy if this was not the case, unless everybody had the same income).
As such, I do not see how this article can be used to say anything about whether the tax is progressive or regressive (and as you mentioned, whether it is fair altogether).
Edit: I suppose if you figure in sales taxes into overall tax burden you could call some states regressive. But that is not a feature of their income tax rates.
in 2014 the top 1% of income earners earned 20.6% of all income and paid 39.5% of income taxes collected.
the bottom 50% earned 11.2% of income and paid 3.45% of income taxes.
https://files.taxfoundation.org/20170201091804/TaxFoundation...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2012/09/19/heres...
If you believe that the regressive nature of state taxes balances the progressive nature of Federal, do you believe that state income tax collects as much as Federal, or are you simply counting them equally because they are both types of taxes? If the latter, why would you say that the rich don't pay more, percentage wise? If the former, why do you believe this?
[1] https://itep.org/whopays/#The%2010%20Most%20Regressive%20Sta...
To make it fair, we take the means of production: ownership over companies, facilities, land.
So basically you got that already.
It's hardly the same thing as taking away, say, the mortgage interest deduction.
Even campaign finance laws reflect this. Suppose you're an airline and you write off the costs of a candidate's tickets when he flies around the country campaigning. The value of those tickets must be recognized as a campaign contribution.
Ah, but you don't write off the costs of airplane tickets for the cabin staff, which is what would really fix the analogy here. Grad-students are serving as employees and trainees of their advisors. In industry, you would never, ever ask a trainee to pay twice their wages in "training costs" to their employer. They'd leave, and never look back.
I agree with people in the other thread that we really should find a way to end the legal fiction that PhD students with "tuition waivers" are being charged or paying any tuition at all. They're something between interns and entry-level employees, except of course that charging interns for the internship remains illegal.