People Want Fairness, Not Economic Equality

there are many unfair side effects of current economics

look at taxes..

recently i read a major corporate entity paid 4k pounds in taxes in 2014(o). The top comment says:

   TIL our small UK startup pays 10-20x more corp tax 
   .. Doing things honestly and by the book
   is expensive in both money terms and time terms
   (paying accountants)
   Big corps .. make me feel like a fool.

or look at fines..

if i get a parking ticket(i) for 100$, i may be unable to pay it right away with my zero savings and my 12k/yr income, someone making 80k+ a year will just pay the 100$ grievance and be done with it

i will have to start budgeting myself to make enough to pay the 100$ fine, but it will take time with bimonthly paychecks and in that time i will be punished with late fees only increasing the financial burden and time needed to accrue the funds

even if trying to do the right thing people punished further simply for economic circumstance

so though the two violators are seen as equal, the expectations and avenues of how to rectify the violations seems unfairly balanced

people making less end up paying more for the same violation due to the bureaucracy maintaining the violations

or i could use a payday loan(ii), another damning option

these are only two examples of areas where a conversation about fairness stead equality alters the direction of the conversation

(o) https://www.reddit.com/comments/3ofo13/ (i) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UjpmT5noto (ii) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDylgzybWAw

Whether zeroed-out grantor-retained annuity trusts should be a valid tax avoidance scheme is a valid question, if that's your point.

Except social security cap -- social security was supposed to be a benefit, not a tax. You don't get paid more after that cap is reached.

And capital gains tax is a stupid example outside of the very narrow debate of carry-interest income.

There is a social security benefit cap, but its on final benefits based on lifetime social security qualified earnings adjusted to account for wage inflation from the year earned. Capping annual social security qualified wages and tax liability isn't actually essential to maintain the integrity of that scheme (and it arguably is unfair treatment to income earners based on degree of annual income volatility.)

Further, the benefit formula already has bend points where aggregate qualified wages past a certain point contribute less in benefits per dollar of wages than below that point, so there's no reason that couldn't be extended and the benefit cap removed, possibly with another bend point.

> And capital gains tax is a stupid example

Asserting that is not an argument. Capital gains are income, and it doesn't make a lot of sense to treat them more favorably than other income in taxation, except that you want to favor capital holders over those deriving income from other sources. (It may make sense to excluded them from the kind of SS/Medicare taxes and qualification calculations, though arguably this is unfair to minor capitalists who must actively manage their own capital to derive income from it, and face similar issues to actual workers when it comes to loss of their own ability to do so; it would makes ense to include individually-received capital gains in both the tax and benefit calculations for SS & Medicare).

Favorable treatment of long-term capital gains is sometimes justified, in a progressive tax system, by the fact that not giving some favorable consideration overtaxes the capital gains as they are not earned over a single year, but progressive tax is based on the presumption that the income received in that year is earned in that year. But when you have enough capital that you can structure it such that you are consistently rotating holdings so that you are regularly realizing "long term" gains, that's less sensible. A more sensible approach to addressing this problem -- which also addresses labor income that has volatility, where the peaks are enabled by the choice to work in a domain where the troughs are also an occurrence, is to simply set up a system for all income where income can be recognized for tax purposes in advance of being realized (and thus, taxed) without limit, and also, with some limits on time and amounts, deferred after realization for tax purposes, giving tax payers with irregular income from whatever source the ability to smooth those irregularities within the structure of a progressive income tax system, without structurally favoring those with large, consistent, capital income streams.

but i'd wonder, how does one 'make some more of it'?

stalinism? you're arguing with someone else

my complaints are against the bureaucracy of the problem

there is more to this conversation than a binary of stalinism and some undefined other

what do you mean by 'easier'? seems to the suffer the same ills as using vague language such as 'fair'

and i'd caution against utilising the concept of 'fact' when discussing subsets

what of a generation born into wealth that fails to make any more if it but their life remains, or even becomes moreso, by your own definitions, 'easier'?