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For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate

nytimes.com

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Re: For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate

#81
post #19

What a shit article. It's well known that despite the high marginal tax rates of the past, very few people ever paid those. Deductions abound that have since been eliminated. What you should really look at is real effective tax rates by income level.[1] What you'll find is that the top 1% make 19% of all income, but pay 37% of all taxes, with an average tax rate of 27%. The bottom 50% earn 11% of all income, but only…

Which taxes are you counting there? Including sales taxes?

And I take with a huge block of salt any tax article with phrases like "These charts don’t tell us whether the top 1 percent contains the same people year after year, experiences a complete turnover annually, or something in between." Good heavens, I hadn't realized that a 100% turnover in the top 1% of earners was possible! Those investments must be doing terribly.

Re: For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate

#82
post #19

What a shit article. It's well known that despite the high marginal tax rates of the past, very few people ever paid those. Deductions abound that have since been eliminated. What you should really look at is real effective tax rates by income level.[1] What you'll find is that the top 1% make 19% of all income, but pay 37% of all taxes, with an average tax rate of 27%. The bottom 50% earn 11% of all income, but only…

I... think you're almost making the point to lower taxes on the bottom 50%, but increase taxes on the top 1%? Is that what you meant to indicate?

Re: For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate

#83

I'm tired to read articles written inside "Opinions" sections.(not that I necessarily disagree with it, you guys are explaining how this article is right or wrong better than me). I would really like (not intended at HN, it's a general crisis in my life) to read more articles about politics that are neutral and factually oriented. It seems like 90% of the political content I read twists facts and build cheap, cherry-…

Politics is a mind-killer

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-i...

Re: For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate

#84
That has to be the worst x-axis on a graph I've seen in a long time. The grid lines measure 0-10th, 20-30th, 40-50th, 60-70th, 80-90th, 95-99th, 99.99th, Top 400? That's atrocious, not only is it non-linear, not only does it have a line with regularly spaced dots giving the impression of continuity, but it skips from percent groups to absolute numbers?

If we're talking about historical taxes why are we looking at tax rates and not taxes paid? Taxes paid by percentage income would be a huge improvement, and absolute taxes seems like an essential number for this conversation.

I'm stunned when I see things like this associated with major universities and newspapers.

edit: The y-axis also goes from 10-70% instead of 0-100%. So both axes are suspicious and the numbers being presented are known for their inaccuracy.

Re: For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate

#85

The argument for corporate income tax is misplaced. Many socialist countries have a low (or no) corporate income tax and that's goods. A country shouldn't tax the things it would like to encourage. In this case, that companies re-invest and not pull the funds out to pay investors. Capital gains tax should probably be mentioned. Why is it a much lower rate than income tax? Why not talk about that? Strange also that th…

basically this. in these mostly socialist countries, the top income bracket starts much much lower than in the US. these countries tax the middle class and consumption with VAT ranging from 15-21% on consumption. in spain the top bracket starts around 60,000 euros a year and its 45% not including local tax. these policies and similar ones in other countries in effect keep the rich rich and make it much, much harder f…

Yup, moved back to one of those countries from a 20%-ish country and since I'm still not rich enough to have tons of deductions I'm really getting squeezed out of about half what I earn.

Re: For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "more effectively" part is important here. Plenty of people will happily vote for increased corporation tax here in the UK to stick it to those evil billionaires and just end up ruining small businesses in the process (while of course the likes of Amazon, Google and Starbucks carry on paying essentially nothing).

So what's the problem with taxing them for egregiously more but ineffectively? What if we kept the current effectiveness but imposed, say, a 120% rate on the ultra-wealthy? Maybe they would end up needing to pay 40% of this but at least it would be a lot better than we are doing now.

Let's say you started out with a 3% effective tax and a 30% ineffective tax. Would adding that 120% be effective or ineffective? If effective it would break their backs, and if ineffective it would kill whatever small businesses couldn't employ the dodge.

Re: For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate

#87

So since this is all 100% legal, are there resources available for people like us in the upper middle class bracket working as engineers in Silicon Valley to take advantage of all this? Almost half of my salary goes to taxes every paycheck. That’s almost $150,000 I literally never get to see just taken away.

You do see it though. In your roads, your public libraries, educated working-class, your parks, your clean air, your safe-to-drink milk, etc etc etc

That's a bit of a simplistic argument about ingratitude though. Let's say he takes his $150,000 that is deducted each year in taxes and then fractions it down by state and federal taxes (federal taxes almost certainly being the majority of it) then fractions that down by what percentage of his taxed income represents federal or state programs for all the things you listed instead of other huge parts of government spending bloat such as military industrial outlays, assorted federal or state pork and so forth. The relative percentage of his $150,000 that actually goes to the things that ensure clean air, good road, parks, safe milk and etc would be much smaller. This is also taking aside just what percentage of any of the useful things any given tax payer actually benefits from personally (maybe he doesn't visit parks at all, or own a car for travelling along the interstate highways). That's where we could argue about someone being ungrateful while benefiting from public funds.

Where things get tricky and shitty (because they heavily lay the criticism on private individuals wanting to keep more of the money they worked for instead of on government not spending so fucking much without pause or careful control) is when you think it's by default somehow whiny to complain that a majority of one's income tax payments that go to a government which inevitably spends the majority of that money on things like the military budget or bureaucratic bloat. Does so much money deserve to go to these things without at least considering the complaints or reasonable debate of tax payers? The Etc etc etc you mention conceals a huge amount of government spending that is validly debatable and shouldn't just automatically be taken as a given because "progress".

I mean, for example, is it unreasonable to ask why an $800+ billion dollar defense budget is necessary for a country neighbored by Canada and Mexico? Is there a real risk that Russia and China will suddenly invade if the U.S doesn't tax its higher income citizens more heavily to pay for that much spending on this huge part of the federal budget? Then of course there's the question of just how much more expensive ensuring even the more "reasonable" basics of public spending that you mentioned is than it could be if there weren't all sorts of known inefficiencies in government services. For example: Federal and state healthcare spending in the U.S is a major part of both state and federal budgets, but how much of it simply gets wasted on terribly administered public health policies?

In basic terms, debates on taxable income also encourage debates on better public spending, and that's not something anyone should dismiss as "privileged whining" if they really think government also needs to be monitored and restricted in how it does things with public money.

Re: For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate

#88
I don't get this spiteful jealousy over the freedom from the slavery through taxation. Why would we not all want everyone to pay as few taxes as possible, rather than being spitefully jealous that some can manage to free themselves of the slavery of taxation.

I get it though, the rich who both benefit most from the slavery of taxation by being individually great beneficiaries of that slave money taken from the middle class, are also the ones who add and modify rules that allows them to skirt the condition of tax slavery.

If you don't realize that taxation (beyond the fundamental costs of operating the core Constitutional roles of government) is proportional slavery; then you really can't contribute anything positive to this discussion at all. No slavey who does not realize they are a salve can ever hope to free themselves.

Re: For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate

#89
post #6

This article fails to account for exemptions and deductions. This post[1] by the Tax Foundation explains it: > However, despite these high marginal rates, the top 1 percent of taxpayers in the 1950s only paid about 42 percent of their income in taxes. Today the 1% pay a little over 36% of their income to taxes. 1. https://taxfoundation.org/taxes-on-the-rich-1950s-not-high/

The difference is still substantial, it's a 13% drop in the effective rate. This is compounded because the top 1% have doubled their share of income since the 50s [1].

1. http://cepr.net/publications/graphic-economics/income-share-...

Re: For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate

#90
post #19

What a shit article. It's well known that despite the high marginal tax rates of the past, very few people ever paid those. Deductions abound that have since been eliminated. What you should really look at is real effective tax rates by income level.[1] What you'll find is that the top 1% make 19% of all income, but pay 37% of all taxes, with an average tax rate of 27%. The bottom 50% earn 11% of all income, but only…

We should establish a checklist of common ideologically biased fudges.

Sounds like you're doing the "pretend SS and medicare don't exist" fudge, right here.

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