when the tax rate went below 70% I lost my job selling limited partnerships in cattle sperm. No rich people paid taxes back then. Shelters were easy to sell because they were going to lose anyway. I sold one which bought real estate and built Taco Bells which actually made money, until the damn republicans cut the loopholes and lowered the rates.
I can't remember if it was Cassius Clay or Mohammed Ali, but one of those fights paid him over a million dollars. And many whites were outraged that a black man could make that kind of money, but they were calmed down when it was pointed out that he was in the 90% tax bracket.
Why doesn't the goverment pay for itself? The government uses people, facilities, and assets in its "activities" just like business. Why does governement tax other entities instead of charging fair arms length prices for its "services"? Taxes should only cover goods and services that businesses cannot provide or if there is common agreement that cost recovery mechanisms would be a substantial and excessive portion of the cost (think parks, roads)
taxes are progressive because the poor don't give a shit about Afghanistan, only the rich want to fight that war so they should be the ones who pay for it. The rich don't mind paying for a Whitehouse dinner because they may be invited. Why should my trash man have his check pillfered so Michelle Obama can serve the proper wine?
lol Hong Kong and Singapore, yeh two global giants there. The Wisconsin National Guard could take care of them all by itself. In regards to charging what the govt service cost sounds like capitalism, were spending hundreds of billions pr yr on protecting foreign nations, charge em, were spending $980 million this year training foreign troops, out of the State Department budget. Most people when going to college or trade school must pay for their own education, why are WE paying for this?
a poor person in Hong Kong may look at the United States and say "US has a tax rate of 38% so I think that is ok for a capitalist society."
This stuff about the "good ol' days" of high marginal tax rates is a crock. It may appeal to the parasites, but fails under closer inspection. Someone gave a nice summary on another website: "the dishonesty or perhaps ignorance in the tax debate that is going on today is the complete misrepresentation of the pre-TRA86 higher marginal rates in the old '53 code. Sure the marginal rates were insane, but the underlying tax code was rife with loopholes that a good tax planner (I was one) could exploit to get a persons effective tax rate as low or lower then it is today. Those loopholes are no longer part of the tax code which is a good thing as they encouraged investors to invest in projects that had no economic viability other then the income sheltering effect they created. What else is ignored in the conversation is the fact that there was a massive amount of tax fraud at all income levels under the old code. It was so bad and so common that most people took pride in telling others how they cheated on their taxes. When I was practicing it was quite common for us to pick up clients that had owned businesses that had grown into large enterprises that cheated extensively on their income taxes sometimes for decades. Usually the only reason this ever got exposed was due to the owners wanting to sell or go public. Today it would be very hard to get away with significant tax fraud for very long and the current code does not offer very many ways to legally shelter income, so a marginal tax rate of 70% would probably produce an effective tax rate on the top 5% of at least 45-50% which would be more then double what the effective rate was under the old tax code. Thus, if we were to go back to those insane marginal tax rates, we would be crossing into a level of taxation never seen in this country." In addition, you could raise the rate to 100% for the top 1%, top 10% or whatever, and the budget still won't be balanced. We have a spending problem, plain and simple.
Should be identical to the tax rate on everyone else. Different tax rates for different earnings violates equal treatment under the law. Progressive/redistributive taxation is legalised theft/extortion, and perverts the law and government from administering just laws, into robbing Peter to pay Paul. Personally I think an administrative government of reasonably fair laws applied equally is a lot more ethical than a extorting gangster government which raids one group to bribe another for votes. I would say that a country with an armed forces capable of defending itself against most global threats, can afford necessary government spending with a tax rate of 15-20%. If some kind of minimum welfare state (e.g. emergency surgery, 6 months unemployment insurance, and basic survival level pensions provided by the state) is desired, then 20-25% is probably more realistic. If you want a bloated military in order to go round gratuitously invading and occupying foreign countries, or a full-blown welfare state, then you are looking at 35-40%, and if you want both than 40-50% is more likely necessary. Anyone think a tripling of taxation is worth it to get cradle-to-grave welfare and unnecessary adventuring abroad by the military-industrial complex?