Lucky for them they can!:
https://www.pay.gov/public/form/preview/pdf/23779454
When these people say "I should be paying more in taxes", they mean that the marginal tax rate should be much higher than it is for high levels of income, not that they'd love to throw in an extra couple of million but can't figure out how to do so.
1.The rich propose higher taxes for themselves
2.The middle class and the poor approve that gesture, as it's "distribution of wealth"
3.Legislative and executive branches approve higher taxes for people who earn above $100k/year
4.The rich manage to not pay those taxes using all sorts of devices
5.The middle class now pay more taxes
5.The government uses the extra income to grow its own size and support the rich through cronyism
I'm not saying your scenario is invalid or unlikely, but it's not the one I've been part of.
If you try for a revenue-neutral change, and the rich somehow avoid paying their taxes, I fail to see how this would result in the middle class paying more taxes without a further tax change.
If the rich avoid taxes, then we should change the tax code, including incentives and enforcement to overcome this. Don't just throw up your hands when you face a problem.
I'm in for that. Make taxes optional, so that if you believe they are a good thing, you pay taxes. If I think they provide no value to me, I pay no taxes and instead I contract services in the free market. That way everybody is happy and get what they want.
That's why we have government because otherwise we can't have nice things (note: in many cases that even doesn't work either but that's the imperfect system we have and need to improve - the alternatives like "self regulation" have been proven throughout history to not be scalable).
On the contrary, self-regulation is now the preferred form of government. It used to be the case that most governments were led by an entity outside the government and outside the purview of the state and society (a monarch). Today most countries are democracies, which means self-regulation of the society by the people that constitute that society, typically via some kind of elected leadership positions (but not always).
Self-regulating markets have also proven to be the most straightforward way to feed and house and provide a middle-class life for most people. Certainly superior to the more planned economies that preceded it.
You probably know this, as do most people making this argument.
Yes, but this is not a valid criticism of the argument. If you believe in raising taxes on yourself and people like you, then you ought to lead by example, and voluntarily pay the extra taxes you would like to pay yourself, while proposing the law forces others to do the same. For example, it would be hypocritical of me to suggest that the law mandate parents care for their children while neglecting my own. Similarly, the 'ultra-wealthy' who are arguing for higher taxes while not voluntarily paying them are hypocrites.
You probably know this, as do most making this argument.
If you believe that instead of giving to charity or something that the best use of your money is taxes, why would it matter if there was an official change to the tax code or not?
Leadership would be paying extra taxes regardless of whether or not the taxes are raised across the board.
It feels kind of slimy to me to say "oh yes we should all pay extra taxes but I won't do so unless the government officially raises my tax rate" - uh so you mean you don't believe in paying more taxes unless the government forces you to? Like the rest of us?
It is definitely more along the lines of moral posturing to me. At least I know where someone stands when they don't want taxes to be raised.
It's like if I buy a big SUV and say that I think we should all drive EVs but I'm not going to do it until someone makes me, but I really believe it!
Uh. Ok. Sell the SUV and buy the EV?
To ensure everyone does it.
Are you suggesting no rich people should support higher taxes unless they volunteer more tax money now? Or what exactly is your point here other than a "ha ha, gotcha!"?
My ire is more directed at billionaires who do such things as publicity stunts as they lobby to lower taxes - especially for their corporations, but essentially, yes. Nobody forces people to use loopholes to lower their tax rates or take deductions, or use a variety of different methods to lower their tax burdens. If they think taxes should be higher on themselves, why do they need to wait until the government raises the tax rate?
* I pay $100,000 in taxes but I think I should be paying $200,000 because I'm altruistic (more likely you want to be well-liked and seem like a good person)
* Here is a link to pay an extra $100,000 in taxes
* ???
I'm not sure how that's a "gotcha". If you say you believe in it, what's stopping you?
There are a lot of things you can do that are not “complain but do nothing”.
-Khrushchev, probably
They're talking about solving problems on a scale of a country the size of the US. A few extra bucks from some small number of wealthy people is meaningless.
That implies that the tens of billions of dollars spent by the rich on charitable donations wouldn't make an impact if given to the government, doesn't it? If that's the case, why tax them for that amount?
The 2019 federal budget was $4.407 trillion. let's say we're talking about $20B in voluntary tax overpayment (good luck with that!), which would represent .004914% of the budget. That would pay about 3% of the interest on US debt in the last year. It would change nothing.
However, increase the marginal tax rate and you're talking about real money. Maybe in the meantime we can spend a little less on the military, but that's a tough sell too.
This is basically why the first iteration of the United States fell apart: the Articles of Confederation basically made taxes voluntary, and they only had to convince 13 states to pay them! Spoiler alert, they couldn't do it, and the first US government collapsed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articles_of_Confederation#Taxa...
This is no different than saying "We don't need laws to prevent dumping industrial waste into water. If your company thinks it's so important, they should just do it." Which will just result in the environmentally-conscious company being outcompeted by everyone else.
Oh boo hoo. I feel so sorry for the multi billionaire who has one less billion than the other multi billionaire.
It's like skinny people who complain about how eating will make them balloon up like a whale.
(My brother was an Army recruiter for his last couple of years before retirement. Oh man the stories he had. How to sour a career no matter how well any of the prior years went.)
I enlisted right out of high school, and yes, my recruiter told me some whoppers. My favorite (boy, was I green): "They don't count weekends days in basic training. You get weekends off!"