Comment by shivasaxena
18 days ago
Not just rich people. Here in estonia small startups like mine pay minimum tax, and reinvest the rest in company.
> There's been a big shift of rich people avoiding taking pay or dividends. Instead they get paid in stock, and then get interest free loans secured on that stock to actually spend money.
They have a stockholding in a firm, and the firm pays CIT on income earned. That sounds fair.
> The other thing that's happened is that a lot of the mega-rich have lobbied to gradually chip away at inheritance taxes. So again they just pass the asset, paying a fraction of the taxes they'd have paid had they been a "normal" tax payer.
Why should my kids be liable to pay a tax when they inherit my house? That house was bought by my income on which PIT was duty fully paid. Again sounds very fair to me.
> And one of the big things they've got? No capital gains on those stocks when passed to children.
Again sounds fair to me.
The heart of this is what you think tax is.
If you just think it's the government stealing your stuff, then it seems very unfair to have your stuff taxed after you die.
But what tax is, under another lens, is a way to divert the capacity of a state to social ends. Everything from the military to the police to prisons and the justice system is what enables you to live in peace and accumulate stuff in the first place. Those are social goods.
So how do you fund this spending? How do you incentivize other people to protect your house? Well, the solution of tax is they take a little bit of your stuff over time, in a predictable way, according to rules that are pre-agreed and can be changed with consensus.
The really tricky part is that both aspects of taxes are true.
The really really tricky part is when taxes are used to penalize you - for instance used to fund agencies that even actively harass you (ICE recently).
Or go to fund programs that only your political opponents benefit from.
Also, anyone living in the bay area can attest how terrible the roads are for how much tax money clearly gets spent on them.