If You’re Getting a W-2, You’re a Sucker
propublica.org
propublica.org
It's perverse "but one day maybe I can too" FOMO defence of the ultra wealthy by ordinary taxpayers. Like antiunionism, I simply can't understand it: this is no evidence of malfeasance by unions which would outweigh the benefit to owners of Starbucks, Tesla and Amazon underpaying workers, and there is no way the W-2 recipient can secure anything like the millions and millions of dollars of benefit the ultra rich secure, but masses of ordinary voters continue to oppose tax reform.
We had this in spades, in Australia last election. A tax feature of fully paid franking credits was up for review and thousands of retired non recipients of franking credits opposed the reform "because they might loose out on future income" which, as pension recipients they would never ever receive: they don't own shares, and the shares they don't own never receive fully franked tax credits.
It's not about loopholes. Instead it is about why there is presently a PERSONAL federal income tax. Simply eliminate the federal personal income tax. The employer payroll tax withholding would then drop, so people working would effectively get a raise.
The fed budget was able to pay for two decades of destructing Afghanistan, so the feds will be ok.
Most taxes are just going to wind up in the pockets of some bureaucrat.
Maybe our government would just spend less. Governments waste money. I don’t care what it is for, if it is a tax increase and I can vote against it I will.
The US federal government is just the largest corporation, with 50 layers of middle management.
I’ll donate to the library, and the parks fund though. Gas taxes also aren’t the worse if they’re only used for transportation purposes. Property taxes should only be used for police and fire departments, and maybe power grid work if you’re on the grid.
Noticeably absent from your list is education, which I am not implying is intentional nor do I wish to say you are against funding it.
If the function of government is to help run a safe orderly society, not funding that seems to be a mistake. Now we’re adding to the list, and there is of course defense, and oh, the FAA as airplanes crashing is a bad idea. And don’t forget the SEC, FDIC, have to protect the financial sector.
And here we are.
UL is not government and reviews consumer electrical product safety, so safety can be done without government.
Government schools are completely untrustworthy. There are many good teachers at them, but they’re just indoctrination centers, for progressive communist bull crap. Hey our local middle school is having the local drag club show up! The kids can’t read, but at least the boys now know it is ok to wear a dress and makeup. And I don’t give a crap if a boy wears a dress.
If there were complete choice as to how to spend that money, and we could fire the shit teachers, pretty much if the local public school was simply funded by the local neighborhood, I’d be ok with that.
The leftist dogma is so ingrained into our culture, even the right wingers, accept so many of their presuppositions. College education, is crap here. And people don’t actually learn how to think, but what to think.
A liberal arts education was a thing once pursued for the sake of education, and now at our universities, it is just another way to make sure you believe the right narrative.
Like we literally have words like “birthing person”, and “chest feeding”instead of “mom” and “breast feeding”, and everyone is so blind they can’t see how stupid that is. Yes a trans man can have a baby and breast feed it, and somehow that means we should stop using common sense. Clown world.
I mean just google it.
Do you not work at a trans friendly place perhaps?
And then some capitalist came up with vaping, so people wouldn’t reek, and did more for preventing cancer in smokers than the government ever had.
No government budgets must justify themselves, and all money must be spent to justify getting more.
Money is power. Billionaires are powerful, not just because they have so much wealth in their name, but they generally control even more wealth via board positions. Well a US senator, controls even more wealth, now that our government is so large. Bernie Sanders hates billionaires because they still maintain a lot of power, and he hates competition.
And smoking rates have fallen precipitously since their height in the past. Long before e-cigs became a thing. It would be hard to pin down the actual cause of the fall, but the rise of e-cigs could only be a small and recent factor.
So our governors ban vaping and people and make it actively harder to get.
London public health was actually smart and encouraged those who smoke to switch to vaping, and encouraged those who do not to not start vaping, still bad for you, but cigarettes are about 10 times worse, though less enjoyable than a cigarette.
And our governors say “what about the children”.
There is also the fact that many people who never smoked are getting into vaping and becoming addicted to the nicotine all the same. Not as bad as cigarettes, but not a healthy habit either.
Clearly you know nothing of Afghanistan, our mission there, and what we did asides from blow up terrorists. We built roads, energy and data infrastructure, government buildings, and trained countless Afghans on everything from construction to IT to self-defense.
There was certainly mission creep and mistakes were certainly made, there is no arguing that.
Nevertheless, we invested more money into building Afghanistan than we did dropping bombs on caves and desert compounds.
Then the Biden administration handed it all to the Taliban, who sold some of it to China.
Others who see no worthwhile reason for that much tax to be levied in the first place.
That's 20/20 hindsight for you.
Afghanistan has rotten substrate - with all of its absurd "green on blue" attacks, the panicky morale of its military, the corruption and kickbacks, its lack of education and religious fundamentalism, it's misogyny and pederasty, and it's general incompetence. They are hopeless but we couldn't let go. We had 20 years of Afghanistan showing its worth - and it was not $2T.
Look at Ukraine and how effective their citizenry is when they are given NATO training and equipment. When Russia invaded did you see Ukrainian men fleeing and falling off of airplane landing gear? Ukraine is worth $2T and 20 years.
By dumping more money into the corrupt bureaucratic black hole?
The problem isn't taxes. It is spending. In the US, record taxes are being collected, almost every year, but somehow the government waste machine just never has enough money to send to their pals.
1. Tax is not zero-sum. They take as much as they can from everybody.
2. Any additional spending would likely also have zero benefit to most people.
3. Greater tax income is only used to take on larger debt, which gets paid for mostly by wage workers.
I am against loopholes for a different reason: they are anti-competitive, essentially a government-granted monopoly on investment and participation in the economy. But even a more “fair” tax is mostly a bad idea.
Taxation is an anachronism. It is an inefficient and coercive way to fund public goods, and even now it’s a relatively small part of cash flow. The most efficient and effective way to finance the government is through bond sales. We don’t need taxes. Seriously, we don’t. Last year, the treasury collected $17.8T from bond sales and $4T in taxes. Bonds are valued by debt (liabilities) to GDP, so ask yourself how much real GDP growth would come from tax elimination.
This should not be just a theory. It requires no modification to the constitution, and no operational changes outside of the treasury, which mostly just keeps doing what they’ve been doing already to fund the government. Congress sets the debt limit. Treasury manages bond sales. Nothing changes. My friends at the IRS might need new jobs, but I got this idea from them anyway.
“Legal tender for all debts public and private” is what gives money its value. People must use dollars if they want the legal system to enforce contracts and rights, and will continue to do so as long as there is benefit to that.
But what about inflation?
In simple terms, price inflation is when demand for goods and services grows faster than supply. Most dollars are not in that demand pool, as they all start out in the investment pool. The nature of investment is that efficiency gains must match the cost, or the investment loses. So an efficient economy balances both sides with investments which increase supply, and payments to workers, which increases demand. In this scenario, monetary inflation can be used to supply investment dollars up to the point where that balance is achieved. (Obviously not all verticals are affected the same way.) Government can be seen as the public goods investor, which is supposed to increase productivity economy-wide more than their own spending. So if that’s true, and all dollars are created under that constraint, inflation is impossible. Big if, of course. Even if not, there should be a very wide berth for ‘unproductive’ investment to inflate demand equal to the over-efficient gains in supply.
What about the environment?
Good point. Productivity has externality cost, some more than others. Firstly, we should be maximizing investment efficiency because financial waste correlates well with environmental waste. Secondly, there could be a strong case made for selling externality rights, and this alone could probably replace all tax revenues in the budget. I don’t know how that would work legislatively. If you ask me, this is what killed Al Gore’s campaign. He suggested that we make corporations pay for their waste, instead of people pay for their work.
So… bonds and maybe Pigouvian auctions.
When my neighbor who runs a small store sold it and paid a lower tax rate, that was pretty cool too.
When my friend who is a real estate agent deducts a bunch of costs from her commissions that seems reasonable.
Not like this is exclusively the realm of the rich.
Wish I could only pay taxes on 2.15/hr of my income.
You should also tip fast food workers.
It's double for married filing a joint return. Then add on top the $24,000 deductible (and other possible credit/deductions).
If you time your breaks from work correctly, you can claim almost $110,000 in long term capital gains and not pay a cent in tax.
https://outsider.com/news/many-americans-making-less-than-50...
And a married couple making $90,000 per year could invest $1,000 per year in SPY, then when the wife quits to stay home with the kids, the family could pull out $20-30k per year in long-term capital gains completely tax free.