Rich People are Evil

[TGLS]

Or people who stop earning at around $90,000 dollars because 100k caused a spike in tax rates.

Or the actual people I know who are in the below 10k bracket, and have to increase their income by a lump of several thousand (if not closer to 10k) because there are WAY too many holes between brackets.

A Flat Tax is the same no matter who pays it. If it's 10%, it's 10% for everyone, and it cuts out the compliance costs that add billions in tax compliance costs to businesses each year. Plus, this means that small businesses can plan around an exact percentage, as can big businesses too.

Is that how taxes work in your country? That's about the stupidest thing I've ever heard of! Where I live, you don't end up paying more tax on the lower portion of the income. For example, if the brackets were: (too lazy to look up)

• 0% <30k
  10% 30-50k
  20% 50-100k
  30% >100k

The man who makes 31k only would have to pay 10% tax on the 1k, and the man who makes 91k, would pay 10% tax on 20k and 20% tax on 41k.

The best thing the government can do is as little as possible to allow people to manage themselves and their businesses honestly.

Which is why during the 19th century there were only two economic depressions, because the government stayed out of commerce, while the 20th century onwards, with its higher regulation, was marked by periodic depressions. Wait, got that backwards.

3: Corporate taxes are still paid by the consumer who pays the corporation their money for the product or service. Hence, corporate are a tax on consumers, not the company.

I'll grant that corporate taxes are (technically) paid by consumers, because consumers are the source of revenue for businesses. However, taxes are paid on net income. Raising prices (and thus raising net income) will only cause you to pay more tax. If you can increase prices to increase income, a business would be daft not to do that.

[Nevix]

Or people who stop earning at around $90,000 dollars because 100k caused a spike in tax rates.

Or the actual people I know who are in the below 10k bracket, and have to increase their income by a lump of several thousand (if not closer to 10k) because there are WAY too many holes between brackets.

A Flat Tax is the same no matter who pays it. If it's 10%, it's 10% for everyone, and it cuts out the compliance costs that add billions in tax compliance costs to businesses each year. Plus, this means that small businesses can plan around an exact percentage, as can big businesses too.

Is that how taxes work in your country? That's about the stupidest thing I've ever heard of! Where I live, you don't end up paying more tax on the lower portion of the income. For example, if the brackets were: (too lazy to look up)

• 0% <30k
  10% 30-50k
  20% 50-100k
  30% >100k

The man who makes 31k only would have to pay 10% tax on the 1k, and the man who makes 91k, would pay 10% tax on 20k and 20% tax on 41k.

The best thing the government can do is as little as possible to allow people to manage themselves and their businesses honestly.

Which is why during the 19th century there were only two economic depressions, because the government stayed out of commerce, while the 20th century onwards, with its higher regulation, was marked by periodic depressions. Wait, got that backwards.

3: Corporate taxes are still paid by the consumer who pays the corporation their money for the product or service. Hence, corporate are a tax on consumers, not the company.

I'll grant that corporate taxes are (technically) paid by consumers, because consumers are the source of revenue for businesses. However, taxes are paid on net income. Raising prices (and thus raising net income) will only cause you to pay more tax. If you can increase prices to increase income, a business would be daft not to do that.

1: Due to the deductions, write offs, and other factors, the tax brackets do not work that way.

There are holes in the current tax structure where you will pay more for a time, get the next deduction, then reach another hole later on, based on whether or not you are married, or if you're single, and a variety of other factors.

Also, as I have mentioned before: Higher taxes on higher earners INVITES buying politicians and companies lobbying for a carve out.

So...yes. There ARE times when the tax code is that stupid, because it's so complex that even the IRS doesn't always give the same answer if called twice with the same question.

Hence my argument for simplicity.

2: We just had an 8 year "recovery" that was actually a depression, where the government encouraged the Federal Reserve to use "quantitative easing" (roundabout printing money) to prop up the economy temporarily and wreck the bond market.

Because the government at the time wanted to interfere and fix the market, while also adding thousands of new regulations that made compliance harder.

February's job creation was 330 thousand new jobs. A year and a half ago, it took a minimum of two months to create that same number of jobs.

The only differences are the current removal of regulations, and lower taxes, favoring businesses and growth.

The more regulations and higher taxes, the better the economy runs. "Running too hot" is a problem you WANT to have, because the other option is running too slow.

3: If your corporate tax rate is zero, you don't have to raise prices to compensate for the lost percentage of profits.

If your corporate rate if 20%, you have to raise prices enough to cover the 20% of profits lost to the government.

Corporate Taxes also encourage using as many loopholes as possible to reduce that tax burden, as well as spending more money to lobby to get more loopholes in the tax code put in, which is why the US tax code is such a complicated mess.

[Nevix]

except the larger a business gets, the less you can trust it to act in a legal or ethical manner. They don't care about their people after a certain point and they aren't gonna give two fucks about the people downwind or river that is being poisoned by their dumping because either, its legal and cheaper, not legal and think they can get away with it, or not legal and don't care if they get caught because the fine and lower cost is still cheaper. So no. you need to regulate business heavily to keep them honest. Explosive growth in the economy has Always lead to counter recessions. Sometimes growth is not good a good thing and there is a certain point where we need to split them up smaller to keep them honest in competition.

How are corporate taxes passed onto the consumer? we would be stuck in an escalated loop of increasing prices. Only way I can see this is under the labor model of taxes (which is a stupid way to tax) where it is easy to factor in the taxes as a cost to be compensated for. Instead businesses should be taxed on their profits and make sure those pesky little dividends are not counted as expenses. This way companies are encouraged to spend.

The stock market. How I hate this over glorified gambling house. Half the sins of free market enterprise can be laid at the feet of this institution and its precious shareholders. People are so ignorant as to think that when they buy stock that money goes to that company, that is only true in IPO's. Meanwhile corporate boards will do anything to increase their stock price (penis compensation logic) and increase dividends to their shareholders to keep them happy

you're right the tax bracket system is only fair if you are standing on one side of the bracket. Its roots in being fair is part crab mentality and That person is more capable than me, they should have to bare an increased proportion of the burden than I do.

1: Big businesses being "evil" (like google, youtube, and other companies trying to abuse their borderline monopoly status) are where the government needs to monitor and regulation.

Which, unfortunately, also requires some governmental reform (which is currently in progress, slowly) to get the government to actually enforce laws and regulations in some cases.

2: For corporate taxes: If the corporate tax rate takes 20% of my net profit, that means I make 80 cents instead of 100 cents on every dollar. If I only make 80 cents on every dollar of net profit, then I need to raise my prices by X amount, until my profits can support the same business that a 100 cents on every net profit would pay for.

It's not an endless loop, unless the corporate tax rate is raised.

It's another cost added to doing business that raises prices and slows down business growth, which slows the economy.

Hence, why I argue that the corporate tax should be zero. Companies ONLY make money by selling a product or service, and thus it's a way to double tax consumers indirectly.

3: The Stock Market is investment, which is paying money to a business now for a return on growth and profits later.

The problem is that it IS risky.

The bigger problem is that the Bond and Savings market had utterly tanked for over a decade due to the Federal Reserve keeping interest rates artificially low, so that the economy would look better, which combined with other factors (though mainly the low interest rates) to make the Stock Market the ONLY place to get good returns. (Barring something like real estate or other investing, which also carries risk.)

4: Thank you.

That's why I argue for the Flat Tax, with a rebate of at least part of the taxes up to the poverty line. Everyone knows what comes out of their paycheck, and everyone doesn't have to worry because their withholding is MUCH easier now.

Or a national sales tax with NO other taxes, which means that we'd keep ALL of our paychecks, and only pay on new products.

[ORCACommander]

I am not sure you understand the difference between Profit and Gross. Gross is the sum of all revenue sources. Profit is gross minus all expenditures. Taxes are not an expenditure if you tax it on the profit/net its merely money you never get. Perhaps its because I am not looking at it from a CFO perspective but from my paycheck W2 perspective that I never have that money that is withheld for my taxes. So I am sorry if you can't support your business while turning a profit then how are you turning a profit? if your not turning a profit you are not going to be taxed at all.

And like I said outside an IPO you are never investing in a business. You are merely paying the former owner of the stock an agreed price of that stock. If i bought 500 shares of general electric stock right now GE would not see a penny of that money. there are only 3 reasons to buy stock, 1 take a gamble and flip it for a higher price than you paid, 2 dividend yield, 3 to exercise voting authority decisions within a company. the 2nd is closely tied with the third and is where i place a large burden of blame on ethically bankrupt and parasitic psuedo monopolies spawn from.

[CharlesPhipps]

It's easy to blame the rich.

And there are plenty of genuine assholes.

But if you are in the uncertain climate of society where you need to have a million dollars to retire and not worry about having to pay for 300,000 to have a lifesaving operation for your child or yourself or otherwise be suddenly impoverished by the system, you can understand why the economy of the USA is so cutthroat.

And there's also the guys in Enron.

A rich man can look after his family and provide them security in an uncertain world.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

It's easy to blame the rich.

And there are plenty of genuine assholes.

But if you are in the uncertain climate of society where you need to have a million dollars to retire and not worry about having to pay for 300,000 to have a lifesaving operation for your child or yourself or otherwise be suddenly impoverished by the system, you can understand why the economy of the USA is so cutthroat.

And there's also the guys in Enron.

A rich man can look after his family and provide them security in an uncertain world.

The reason WHY lifesaving operations cost so much is BECAUSE of these hyper-rich bastards.

A rich man can provide for his family, provide security, hire a small army of security professionals, and he still goes out of his way to lay off workers at companies to increase profit margins so he can buy more companies and make more money to buy a few legislators so that he can make sure other people can't provide for their families.

Shitty healthcare? That's rich people lobbying.
The death of retirement? That's rich people lobbying. You only have to look several decades back to see a time when retirement was feasible!

I'm barely even talking about the man who makes six figures as a doctor. You are mistaken if you still conceptualize "rich" as people who need money for things. They have more money than they will ever need, for anything, and when they do let some of it leave their hoarde, it's to stop other people from getting money.

Or, for a TL:DR, the people responsible for 90% of pollution could fit in TWO greyhound buses.

[CharlesPhipps]

The problem with that is it's basically turning "rich people" into the Illuminati.

They're not an organized block.

They are people who exist in the engine.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

Except the illuminati is made up to recruit people into anti-jewish conspiracy theories, whereas any super-rich person could solve so many problems by just...not being obscenely rich anymore.

[CharlesPhipps]

Except the illuminati is made up to recruit people into anti-jewish conspiracy theories, whereas any super-rich person could solve so many problems by just...not being obscenely rich anymore.

Well....I don't think so.

The vast majority of super rich people are super rich due to owning businesses, property, and non-cash things that are not easily transferable. My dad owned a bank and an insurance company and a mall. He could theoretically have liquidated all of his assets and given them away but that would just mean that the property would have to be bought by other rich people, not increasing the net wealth of the public because that's the difference money and wealth.

Going back to my dad, he was constantly forgiving loans and employing people as well as working with the state government to try and repair the dying industries in my city. Indeed, he lost most of his fortune propping up the largest employer in the region (which sadly was destroyed by Enron--long story there). I'm not saying my father was a saint and I wish I could use a less personal anecdote but the problems were not the rich people in my incredibly poor wasteland of a city (Ashland, Ky) but the policies created around them.

Our town was destroyed by Ashland Oil leaving the city which was done on behalf of the stockholders by the executives to keep the stock price rising which was, as Wallstreet (a very misunderstood movie) pointed out something that didn't require the company to actually produce anything valuable. The stock price being a form of currency itself is a form of loophole abuse that results in vast amounts of corruption.

I mean, you could have all businesses owned by the government (see Stalin, Mao, etcetera) but wealth is not something easily divied up that makes the world a better place.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

Your anecdote of your father is, at least, well...it made me think.

It still sounds a bit like "the only thing that can stop a bad rich person is a good rich person" though. All of these problems are things created by rich people who want to be even richer.