It's ridiculous my tax rate is over 30% while wealthy people has it at 15%, and Amazon has it at 0%. That's the real problem! Yang wants to give people #1kBro so they can shut up about the real issue here is tax fairness.
Eg, To a pretty reasonable first approximation, all of Amazon's income is either going to be (1) distributed to shareholders and trigger income/capital gains tax or (2) invested in making goods cheaper for amazon's customers.
It isn't immediately obvious that it is a good idea to tax a system designed to get goods to people cheaply. The money Amazon reinvests in itself is in the short term all about making life better for its customers, not its owners. In the long term that reverses, but the reversal triggers additional tax events.
> It's ridiculous my tax rate is over 30% while wealthy people has it at 15%
The wealthy will be paying much more tax than you though. In raw amounts, the wealthy are doing much more to run the government financially than you are by orders of magnitude.
It isn't immediately laughable. A billionaire is making an absurd contribution vs. other taxpayers even at a 5%. And again, that part of their money isn't going towards themselves, it is difficult to consume that much in real resources in a year. It is likely going to investing in things that other people want.
There is no obviously-right or obviously-wrong with tax. Systems are complicated.
This also has a disproportionate effect on the rest of the government, however. The wealthy clamor for tax cuts because they already pay more than everyone else (and as long as income disparity exists, this is going to be a fact, so it's not really much of an argument) which in turn means said tax cuts can break the bank so to speak. Which results in cuts to systems that the poor and less wealthy rely on to live, things such as basic schooling or financial aid.
In turn, that money that they do get tends to go towards things that entrench their power. Politicians, mainstream media, things such as that. I personally have not heard a strong argument for not taxing the wealthy and corporations more, because for all the tax cuts we've seen we're still in dire straits when it comes to dealing with poverty and healthcare. So clearly something isn't trickling down here.
Also maybe worth looking at how big of a tax break Amazon got for their R&D budget who only benefits... Amazon.
The thing that matters here is the rate, the tax rate and America has it wrong, I consume the same % as a wealthy person, my class collaborated way more (raw amount and rate) to the society than the wealthy.
Consider: if a company had no profits at all, then for some period of time it would still (1) pay its employees (2) pay the payroll tax on behalf of those employees. The amount of payroll tax is 100% determined by employee compensation, not corporate profit (even if those two are indirectly connected).
You're more or less arguing that employee compensation is a tax too, since it also "raises the price the company has to pay and thus lowers profits".
Just like any other tax on employee income does, yes; unlike taxes on company profits, and like other taxes on employee income, it's effect on the company can be minimized by finding (or developing) and adopting less labor-cost intensive business methods even if they are higher (before tax) total cost.
$2.4 billion in subsidies for these taxes, says one accounting: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/03/technology/amazon-new-yor...
A bunch of warehouses by the airports do not actually create any large property tax bill.
Personally I like a flat tax because it drastically simplifies the tax system and removes the loop holes that wealthy people who can afford accountants use to achieve the lower effective tax rate stated in the root comment. It also deletes the tax prep Industry and a significant majority of the IRS, these Ultimately act as drag in our economy for arguably a net negative benefit.
A flat tax isn't fair unless every other form of expense was flat as well. Which means rent would have to be some percent of your income and the same for power, healthcare and so forth.
The tax progression is pretty much the simplest part of any tax code anywhere in the world already, so targeting that as the thing to simplify is either stupid or hypocritical.
The loopholes and complexity lies in the fact that, in order to account for people who are self-employed, you typically want to allow subtracting certain kinds of expenses from people's incomes for the purpose of tax computations. That's where the mess starts because then people start playing games with how those expenses are classified and structured, and wealthier people can afford to employ expert players of those games, making the whole game unfair from the very beginning. That in itself should be justification for a progressive tax code.
It'd be awesome if we could remove those subtractions from the tax code, because that would be the way to really simplify things. Unfortunately, it's also a really bad idea because it would severely punish low-margin activities, and from a societal point of view, we actually want most economic activity to be low-margin (because that provides the highest value to the end-user/consumer).
So we're stuck in a world where we'd like to simplify the tax code, but doing so requires diving deep into the nitty-gritty details of how it all works. And for people who have that knowledge, it's more profitable to play the game by selling their knowledge to the aforementioned rich people so most of them end up doing that instead of taking up the thankless political work of actually simplifying things. At least, that's how the incentives are playing out today.
This is what causes the main issue with flat taxes. The problem is that at the end of the day, flat taxes are simply very inefficient in that they cause much more suffering for less revenue compared to progressive taxes.