Comment by andsoitis
2 days ago
Good. If, however, DOGE gets access, then, like some Nordic countries, I think we should demand public disclosure of all of it.
The public deserves seeing what the richest rich pay in taxes, the middle class, and the poor. There’s so much fud and fog in the political discourse around tax burden.
Current POTUS famously, notoriously, refused to disclose his, as has been tradition.
Actually the kernel of a good idea. Over a certain level of wealth taxpayers have a right to know why you're denying them millions of dollars of income, so your tax returns are a legitimate public interest.
Basically if you're paying close to the "full amount" of your tax rate in say the $5 million dollar range, then no disclosure required. If you're substantially under that your deductions should be public.
My issue with this is that it still won't make people happy, because ultimately people care about wealth too. Like say some big CEO's income is $100M/year. And they pay half of it in taxes. Then after a decade they have half a billion dollars. Will people be content seeing that? Or still be unhappy at the obscene wealth?
Warren Buffett famously claimed he paid a lower effective tax rate than his secretary.
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The problem is that aren’t paying “half of it in taxes”, not even close.
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Another way of stating this straw-man argument might be "what if we tried to do anything meaningful at all about wealth inequality and the market distortions it causes and people liked it?"
But you're just defining the "full amount" as what you think they should pay. If they're abiding by the tax code, they are paying what the law considers "the full amount".
It would not be discriminatory to say "we're going to publicize the returns of anyone who commits tax fraud". It would be discriminator to publicize the returns of anyone the Marxist hive mind thinks should pay more taxes than they are legally required to.
If the rich commit tax fraud, put them in jail. If they don't "pay their fair share of taxes" but don't commit any crime in so doing, be mad at the people who wrote the tax code.
There are a million different ways to ascertain "income" to evaluate whether or not a person is paying their "fair share". That we doggedly refuse to do any of them if your income is not subject to payroll taxes is a big reason why people (rightly, I think) don't trust elites.
To be honest, I have no special qualms with businesses doing their level best to minimize their tax obligations, provided they invest in their workers and/or R&D. Its just that they don't. The whole point of the old-timey ridiculously high highest marginal rate was to induce companies to do literally anything else than just pay their top executives more. Higher wages for the rank and file, investment in facilities, R&D, charitable giving, etc etc etc all have far greater impacts on society than the equivalent quantity shipped to the fed as taxes. If the ultra-rich want to avoid paying taxes by instead donating large sums of money to charities with broad socioeconomic impact, I have no problem with that either, for the same reason.
The issue is not that the ultra-rich don't pay their "fair share" (whatever that means), its that the tide that raises their ships does not raise all ships equivalently, and the ways they avoid paying that "fair share" disproportionately benefits only them. I don't really benefit if Jeff Bezos donates a lot of money to Jeff Bezos' nonprofit to manage his art collection or whatever. I do benefit if he just paid an equivalent amount into the general tax fund (or donated it to the March of Dimes or something).
I regularly pay out 20% of my annual income in the form of taxes. Its hard to be super sympathetic to e.g. Elon "I paid $11 billion in taxes last year!" Musk, when most years he pays far far less than that, and his net worth (as figured by his borrowing potential) grows proportionally a lot faster than mine does.
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> If the rich commit tax fraud, put them in jail.
I feel this doesn't happen as often as it should. I don't even think the IRS is catching enough wealthy tax cheats. The GOP has traditionally cut funding to the IRS which lowers their audit rate and/or limits their audits to those to the less wealthy. (Since going after the really wealthy requires a lot more work.)
I'll add every dollar of IRS funding nets many more dollars of taxes--if we ran the government like a business (for the sake of argument) we should invest a lot more into the IRS. It's free money.
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Do I blame the wealthy for paying only what’s owed? No.
Do I believe it’s unfair that the wealthy pay a lower effective tax rate than me simply because their income is passive and not wages/salary? Yes.
Do I blame them for perpetuating this state of affairs to the detriment of the nation as a whole? Yes.
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> But you're just defining the "full amount" as what you think they should pay.
No, I think they're defining it as something like "the tax you would have paid if all your personal revenue that year had been ordinary income". The baseline is not an opinionated criterion, it's what most people deal with.
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I don't know why you're putting the 'Marxist hive mind' in charge, maybe some academics across the political spectrum instead?
I think maybe the point is to shame those using aggressive tax strategies. You can always exploit the law as written, if you put enough money behind the endeavor. It's impossible to write a law that is bullet proof.
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Claiming a deduction does not actually mean you are entitled to that deduction.
Only if pricing information is also made public. Otherwise, a person with relatively high income, but who also wants to be frugal, will get gouged.
Discriminatory pricing could become a private income tax.
Oh god you're right. I heard that some vendors are already buying data from credit card companies and joining that with their data on you to do price discrimination but this will enable price discrimination on a country wide level. :/
Sure, you want to be thoughtful about disclosure and unintended consequences.