With a cursory glance it is very obvious. It only becomes less obvious when you explore the details. A flat tax rate, from my viewpoint, would be ideal (everyone treated the same). Unfortunately, we are not all in the same boat, and the country has a serious debt problem. It may be necessary to compromise our ideals for the time being in order to extract ourselves from our predicament. When you consider that many of the very wealthy do not have any earned income and therefore may be taxed at very favorable rates compared to the working class, the picture becomes somewhat cloudy. (Curiously, if you ask the average person what the difference is, from the IRS point of view, between earned and unearned income, not many will know.)
i'll try and dumb it down a bit more for you- imagine two pies- one representing all the income earned in a country broken down by incomes, another representing all the taxes collected broken down by the incomes they came from. the first pie almost half (40%) of it would be the money that was earned by the top 5%. the second pie more than half (58%) of it would be the money that was taken from the top 5%. if taxing was fair- both slices would be the same size. and the funny thing is that the loudest cries of people saying taxes aren't fair come from the far left who want to further distort these inequalities. amazing how people who add nothing to society while living on the dole think their dole isn't generous enough and that others owe them even more- changing the american dream slowly from achieving greatness for yourself without the government intervening, to leeching off of other's work and demanding more. america is the only country where the "poor" have a cell phone, color tv, car and are fat.
My fault. I'm a slow typist. I added more in an edit. Edit: And let's not forget that everyone pays at least some indirect "tax" via inflation. And that has a more important impact on the poor than the wealthy. There are many subtleties, i'm afraid, that cloud these issues.
as time goes on i'm actually becoming a bigger and bigger fan of inflation as taxation- it is impossible for anyone to evade it, and if you plan properly you can benefit from it. i'm a huge advocate of the flat tax, i'll just have to accept inflation as it's substitute for now.
Gab is immune to the high taxes he wants to decree from on high for me & other productive US citizens. If he loves high taxes so much, he can send an extra check to his own country's Treasury.
Still doesn't answer the question, does it? And you still can't bring your argument to a successful conclusion and so you resort to dodge & parry, dodge & parry. Rodney, you have a magician's gift for misdirection: "Look over there, not over here." Let's try again, shall we:
I still haven't made up my mind. I do like the idea of a flat tax. It seems fair to me. I'm just not convinced that it is for the best of the country over the long term. If a flat tax leads us down a path where more and more wealth is concentrated in the hands of the few...that's not going to work. Society will revolt at some point. Isn't this one of the major causes of the French Revolution? I'm pretty sure a flat tax would create that type of scenario. So the question becomes finding the right tax that keeps wealth somewhat spread out, keeps a strong middle class, and yet is not too heavily imposed on the wealthy
What's ironic is old folks when their bennies but national health care for those that actually pay taxes hell no.
This sums it up nicely. The rich have "been paying less" and that's all that matters. The politics of envy. As for paying less in taxes, which rich are we talking about? A few privileged Wall Street types, or the successful small businessman who makes $300K a year? Are you sure they're paying less taxes than prior decades? Did you take into consideration big increases in state/local taxes, as well as those for gasoline, alcohol, tobacco, property, excise/user fees, import taxes, etc.? You also have higher costs for health care as providers have to recover undercompensation from Medicare (i.e, a hidden tax--we would have to fund even more than we do now to avoid this). And for food of all sorts as land is used to grow ethanol for gov't incentives. There are dozens if not hundreds of other examples. In addition, there were write-offs and loopholes in past decades that are now gone. Practically no one really paid the exorbitant rates you hear about. So we all pay for hidden taxes, much more than we used to. Some end up being regressive, which I oppose as much as progressive taxes. But to simply say "the rich have been paying less in taxes than they have in decades" is an asinine blanket statement if I ever heard one. No wonder Obama had so many drones mindlessly chanting "Yes we can (get more handouts!)" as he spouted out his dime store class warfare venom. I'd expect people on a trading site to be smart enough not to fall for that. Unfortunately, we seem to have many here who are more worried about punishing successful achiever than they are about trading or anything else that could improve their lot in life.
I don't read much from them, but one of the smartest guys I knew growing up works there--or did at one point. By contrast, I know plenty of idiots who are DC bean counters and would have no problem fudging data like this: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/jobs-saved-created-congressional-districts-exist/story?id=9097853 When was the last time you questioned Obama or the CBO? And what percentage of big gov't programs have come in on budget?