I do not want to work because government eats too much taxes of low-qualified workers (me) and eats too little taxes of high-incomers. Having nothing with a goal to receive maximum possible of spare time works not bad for me.
1. If you take the video at its word, then it is still the case that the richest are paying more taxes. In the final graph the richest decile is paying over 30% while the poorest is in the mid 20's. The curve is slightly crescent shaped, with the poor 20-30% paying less than the poorest, but beyond that the trend holds that richer pay more. The video summarizes this slope as "mostly flat".
2. The video adds 15% for payroll taxes to the poorer deciles even though the video says that 7.5% is paid by the employee and 7.5% is paid by the company. The video explains that "economists have found that in practice companies pay their part of the payroll tax by just paying workers less." The video doesn't offer any source for this claim. If you Google the claim you see it is, not surprisingly, disputed by economists. It's not a plausible claim in the first place, and if you are allowed to support a claim because some economist somewhere might have said something kind of like it then you could really claim anything. Once you adjust the 15% the video incorrectly added to every lower decile back to 7.5% then the trend of the rich paying more, which was always present, becomes even more prominent.
3. The chart shows the richest 400 Americans as a column on par with the other deciles. This is visually deceptive because it causes you to think of this category as being a similar kind of thing - but it is not, it's a much smaller and extreme group. These people made massive amounts of money from stock in huge companies, gains which are often unrealized, and so taking this small group and graphing it next to deciles distorts what is being shown. How would the graph look if we added on the 400 poorest Americans? And why would we do that except as some rhetorical trick?
4. The video is uninterested in net taxation. That is, poor Americans get significant transfers of money back from the government. For some groups this is substantially more than they pay in taxes which would make their net interaction with government profitable. I can't really agree that a group "pays" X% in taxes if they receive from government transfers more than they paid.
5. The video description says that "All of their data, which we used to produce this video, is available on their website." But it's not. At least, I hope it's not all the data they used to produce this video. There are a few unexplained Excel sheets with some unsourced and unexplained data on the "Tax for Justice" website, but nothing like what I would expect to underlie the claims made in these figures. For example, I wanted to look at how they calculated the sales tax rates, since those varied by state and I thought that the poorest people might be spending more in categories that have no sales taxes (e.g. food) - but... maybe I didn't look hard enough, but I couldn't find anything like this. Just some random tables with numbers.
6. The top decile earns about half the income for the country. They also pay the highest tax rate. So, it's pretty obvious that, in objective terms, most of the taxes are paid by the rich. Even if, pre-benefits, the poor paid tax rates that were only ~10% lower than the richest decile, the richest decile would still be paying substantially more objective dollars in taxes.
7. It's also a bit weird to me that Vox, nominally a news organization, would just uncritically repeat the work of left wing activists out of Berkeley. Is regurgitating advocacy what a news organization is supposed to do?
Employers pay taxes + net wages and employees only receive net wages no matter who the government says is paying a tax; it should mostly be shared based on price elasticity
Although most people don't understand that well, which likely affects behavior irrationally:
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2017/11/15/economists...
Another consideration is that wages are sticky, so while tax burden might be shared more based on price elasticity for new offers, new taxes probably would actually fall upon the side the government says (since employers are unlikely to adjust pay up/down for existing employees just because one side has to pay more taxes)
Average sallaries are obscenously taxed. In my country having a cheap rental/airbnb grants you a better income than an average full time job..
Who cares how you came by the money? It is fungible.
[0] https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments...
Also, while some of those benefits are less fungible, others have phase-outs that are functionally identical to taxes at the margin. For example, if you get subsidized health insurance through healthcare.gov, every additional dollar that you earn directly reduces your tax refund by up to ten cents, on top of your marginal tax rate.
In this case, taxes and how much anyone pays are irrelevant because you're not those people and because the real consideration with work is to ignore the immutable circumstantial limitations and decide if the exchange of time and toil is worth the post tax currency you'll be compensated with and what you can do with that money.
If I'm living at home and soon going backpacking in Southeast Asia with my $4/hr(post taxes assuming minimum wage of $7) for 6mos, it'll give me a ton of utility. Meanwhile the guy who smokes 3 packs a day at NY state rates and pays $2000/mo for a studio apartment, much less so.
When everyone gets it, it becomes baked into rents or mortgage payments, and I've never heard a convincing argument about how the money just doesn't go to rent seekers over time
If so how?
If not, how are they cheaper than somebody who only wants to work for fun?
True, unless there’s a land value tax. But a man can dream.
The ubi receiver still loses and needs other support
Alternatively, the recipient can run a homestead on his share of land.
Another solution is to invest more in our public housing stock. Private apartments could march up sure, but they'd be competing with the government building with subsidized rents designed to be affordable under the UBI plan, which would put downwards pressure on prices.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/09/24/economi...
I stopped wanting to push my business forward when my govt has forced me to get computers and internet access in my grocery store for sending info about each transaction. That equipment slows down a number of people which I can serve per minute. The software I have bought is ugly as hell and prints 5cm of advertisement on each paper check I use to give to a client. Excuse me trees, I do not know how to fix that.
In a perfect world, RMS' advice about tax rate based on the fraction of any given market that the company controls seems a good start.
You don't work because of this than you don't gain new skills than the chance you are getting hired is even less.
Then you are imprisoned with the little money you get and be more and more dependent while it gets harder and harder for you to get out of.
And why? Because you think it's not fair that you work for your own part of the taxes everyone needs to pay.
If we did that, GP might be willing to work since the effective pay rate would be higher.
And I'm not even against your idea.
Not working costs you money indirectly and keeps you were you are.
If you are poor and provide less than 20k€ to the state, you’re making others work for you.
Income = Rough approximation of your contribution to society.
Income Taxes = Penalty for contributing, but also another contribution to society.
Not only are poor people not contributing (by definition of being poor), they're also convinced their tax contribution is too high.
Poor person: "My taxes are too high, I contributed a whole $20 to society through a 20% tax on my $100 income. That's not fair, the guy who contributed $100k through tax only gave 10%."
If I'm being radical, I'd propose a flat tax amount (not flat rate). Everyone pays $20k/year. Don't have $20k? Take out a loan and get another job.
Poor person: "I don't buy from McDonalds because it's unfair their prices as a percentage of income are higher for me than for rich people."
That's how retarded it sounds to me hearing people talk about taxes as percent of income. Yet that's somehow the dominate narrative.
Tax enabled the infrastructure and social structure that made your income possible in the first place.
Tax is a fee that the government uses to invest in its country to stimulate economical ans social development. Paying tax will in the long term benefit your net. income.
Effectively, the 'poor person' is netting $80,- for their time. The 'other guy' nets $90.000,- for their time. Those are the only figures that count, and they look very bad for the 'poor guy'.
Some people think they are 'better' persons because they pay more taxes. I argue, they are persons who took home way more income: the tax is just a fee that they pay for being allowed to live and work in their country. The price for the opportunity that they received to earn $100k.
If you feel "better than others" because you pay more taxes, you are a very sad individualistic person.
Yes, contributers are better than freeloaders.
By your logic, a dog walker is equivalent to a doctor, and given only enough resources to save one of their lives, we should toss a coin.
hahahah oh my god hahahaha. Nah I can't even argue with this, it's so backwards.
Poor people work 1 day/week (or so inefficiently that it should be considered 1 day/week), and therefore should be paying a 100 tax. Exactly what I was saying.
By this logic sending a job overseas to lower paid workers makes the exact same job contribute less to society. It also means all unpaid work contributes nothing to society. This is particularly absurd with opensource software that generates millions or billions for big corporations.
I did mention income being a rough approximation, implicitly acknowledging unpaid work. Yes, I agree that open-source contributions should be counted as charity donations in regards to taxes.