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Comment by TechBro8615 | Hacker News Reader

Do they not pay payroll taxes for the nearly 100k people they employ?

That's not a proportional share

Without getting into a debate about progressive taxes, Bezos pays far more than his fair share in taxes. The social burden that he creates is microscopic compared to the tax revenue he pays. If he disappeared tomorrow, the national budget would be in worse shape than it is today.

Complain to your senators, then? Congress is who sets the algorithm defining how taxes are owed, not the taxpayers themselves. Have you ever written the IRS a check for more than what you owe them (or declined to accept a tax refund)?

That's the entire point of this conversation, we want higher taxes and more people (voters) need to be convinced of this fact.

I live in DC so I don't have any Senators and barely any say in how my tax dollars get spent.

Congress voted to do that. They could undo it and make everyone a citizen of Virginia if they wanted to undo it.

Oh great let me just lobby my no senators and single non voting house delegate to fix it. How about in the meantime I don’t have to pay federal taxes if I don’t get a day in how they’re spent?

Also: neither VA not DC want retrocession and you can’t force a state to change its borders. So no, the answer is DC statehood, which is something Congress can do. It’s long past time.

I doubt Congress would vote to give the wealthiest people in the country even more power, they would rather it just ctrl-z what was done.

I didn't realize there was an income limit to statehood.

I agree with your other points but isn't it kind of your choice to move to DC, knowing full well that they lack full representation? It isn't like DC is this massive landscape of a bunch of natives who have lived there for generations and are too poor to move 10 miles away.

Voting representation in America is privilege not a right after all. History shows us that time and again.

Also I like DC. Why do I have to choose between living in the American city I like and having a vote in Congress?

I've been trying to get a meeting with my Senators to express my opinion, but they won't have me. They regularly take meetings with corporate lobbyists though. I wonder what it is they're telling my Senators? Sure wish I had $10 million to spend on lobbyists like Amazon.

You elected Senators that don't care about your opinion. Maybe you should be more mad at them and less mad at Amazon who provides millions of people with exactly the goods and services they promise.

Brazen assumption that the senator they voted for is the one in power. It is a democracy after all, they could have been on the wrong side of it

Such a lazy deflection. When corruption happens you can be mad at both the corrupter and the corruptee.

What’s lazy is not holding the people who are supposed to represent your interests accountable.

1.3 million*

No. The people they employ pay the payroll taxes out of their salary. No company pays payroll taxes for their employees.

Businesses pay the same amount in payroll taxes as employees do. Self employed people pay double the payroll taxes.

Technically, self employed people pay less than double because they can deduct the employer contribution. So I think it’s like 12.4% for self-employed vs, 7.5% for just an employee.

This is more complicated than you make it out to be.

The person who literally sends the money according to the law is not the same as the one who pays in the economic sense.

For instance, you could transfer the legal obligation to the other party, but that would change the negotiating position between the employer and the employee.

Similarly, you can add a sales tax to some product, and make the company that sells the product collect it and forward it to the government, but that doesn't mean that the company is worse off the that amount. The pie is split according to some negotiating position.

Not really. Firms hire based on the cost of an employee. If suddenly the employer portion of the payroll tax disappeared, there would immediately be an incentive to funnel those funds into the salary to make job offerings stand out against what the employee's other options would be. Sure, some firms would pocket it, but it beggars belief that most of them would, when they've already made a decision to open a hiring line based on the funds available and projected revenue.

> If suddenly the employer portion of the payroll tax disappeared...

That's what I'm saying. The piece that's added or removed is negotiated over, it doesn't just belong to whoever has their name on it.

"There are a variety of payroll taxes, some paid by employers, some by employees, and some by both."

https://www.paychex.com/articles/payroll-taxes/employers-gui...

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