What total utter crap. Taxes is the price you pay for a civilized society, and the US has far less taxes that most western countries, and as a result is arguably less civilized. Millionaires whining to other millionaires in the WSJ. Spare me.
Taxes take money out of the private sector and thus reduce the pool of capital for private sector job creation. Our taxes go to fund bankers and wars. That's why we're in such bad shape. If they went to build roads and bridges no one would care so much.
You could argue that you don't get much for them, but that wouldn't be true either. Most government programs are very popular, but it is strangely still popular to hate the government. The logical disconnect there should be obvious.
Most people will enthusiastically support programs that take $2 from other people and give $1 to them. If you have lots of programs like that they're clearly wasteful in aggregate, but each individual one will have vocal supporters.
He's paying almost as much for his end of the health insurance as the total tax take. What's he whine about? Taxes. Who's providing more bang for the buck, the health insurance company or the relevant federal, state and local governments? Does he have kids in school?
Does this guy even look at his own numbers?
This is a nice bit of sleight of hand but in reality our taxes that go to the gov't go back into the private sector, and according to our national debt do so at a greater rate then we take it in. Bankers and the Defense industry are in the private sector. Tax money doesn't just disappear from our economy. Heck even Mr. Bogen probably doesn't complain when he gets a contract for providing A/V systems for schools.
Besides, whether it is the private or public sector wasting money on wars it hardly makes a difference. It's the people's money and the people would rather keep it or see it used for more productive ends to benefit all and not some elite.
Unlike many in the political class, this man actually PAYS his taxes and the payroll taxes of his 80+ employees in pursuit of private enterprise.
Considering he has risked his own private capital to create jobs, he has earned some right to "whine" about the current trend of taxation.
Actually, it doesn't. US tax revenue per-person is pretty much in the middle of western Europe.
Things look different because US GDP/person is higher and poor workers only pay for their retirement. (SS payouts are fairly progressive, so it's a good deal for the poor and sucks for those near the cap. The cap exists because we don't want rich people to care about SS and we don't want to pay $400k/year to Ross Perot. If you want to remove the cap, please tell us how you're going to deal with rich people caring about SS, which they will if benefits are capped, or if you're going to uncap the benefits as well.)
Not really. The OECD average is 36%, Americans pay 28% and no western European states pay less. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenu... In nominal terms the US may be higher, but I don't really see that that proves anything. The main problem is of course that so much has to be paid for by the individual in the US that is efficiently taken care of by the state in Europe, so comparing tax rates misses a big part of the issue.
> Not really. The OECD average is 36%, Americans pay 28% and no western European states pay less.
Yes really. American's pay 28% on a larger number, so the amount of money per person is basically the same.
BTW - you're ignoring corporate taxes, which are a significant fraction of revenues. They don't actually change the equivalence but they do increase the "revenues per person-year" number.
> nominal terms the US may be higher, but I don't really see that that proves anything.
Actually, it does.
> The main problem is of course that so much has to be paid for by the individual in the US that is efficiently taken care of by the state in Europe, so comparing tax rates misses a big part of the issue.
I'm not comparing tax rates. I'm comparing tax revenues per person.
You're pointing out that western Europeans get more for the same amount of money.
Combining those two facts tells us that a tax dollar goes further in western Europe than it does in the US.
If the US govt wants to provide the same benefits, it either needs more money per person than European govts or it needs to take the relevant amount of money from its other expenditures.
Don't you mean `regressive' then?
Not at all. A "progressive" tax system defined as one where those with more money pay a (progressively) larger fraction of said money. Since SS also has direct benefits, you look at the sum.
I own my own LLC, and lose 45% of my "salary" to taxes (in large part because I pay both 7.5% "halves" of my Medicare tax). Is that far less than it would be in most other Western countries?
The real problem is that for roughly the same tax burden, you don't get a fraction of what Western European or Canadian counterparts get. No socialised healthcare, no government-subsidised education, a pitiful two weeks of paid vacation at best, joke unemployment benefits, etc.
I'm not necessarily arguing that any of that should be the government's job or that all aspects of it are fundamentally fiscally sustainable. I'm just pointing out that you get quite a bit less for your money; an alarming preponderance of your income tax goes to prosecuting pointless wars, Wall Street bailouts, and other suitably kleptocratic endeavours. Local and state government operations are substantially funded by sales taxes, property taxes, excise taxes, and other taxes not even accounted for by your 45% figure; the income taxes do not yield many practical, down-on-the-ground results apart from the relatively small portion of the federal budget that goes to state-bound block grants.
This is the sort of comment that drags down discussions about politics. No one is advocating that sort of thing here.
In fairness, the comment changhiskhan is replying to, that US is "arguably less civilized" is quite a mouthful as well, and is the sort of thing that sets of long, fruitless flame wars that lead nowhere.
Not sure I agree that it was all that inflammatory. It mas a bit tongue in cheek, but actually has a little bit truth to it. Anyway. You can take the boy out of Reddit, but not ...
Would you really want to waste any of your time with someone who believed in either 0 or 100? They're some sort of True Believers and nothing you can say - neither facts nor logic - will dissuade them from their view. Luckily though, this community is mostly composed of cleverer folk than that, something that ought to be pretty obvious.