361–370 of 504 posts
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If they were going to fly a plane into the pentagon to cover up 2.3T in missing funds, why would they bother to announce the shortfall beforehand? You don't orchestrate an elaborate cover-up, and also publicly announce the thing you're trying to cover up.
Because that's, like, what they want you to think man. :)
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> It’s a lot easier on your sanity to just accept that (insanely) crazy coincidences happen. Perhaps if your goal is peace of mind rather than correctness. All crazy things are not necessarily coincidences.
What would you think about the whole thing if the missing money announcement came on the 9th of September ("can you believe it came less than 48 hours after Rumsfeld came public with this info!?)? The 8th? The 4th? The 1st? The 10th of September, 2001 was a Monday. What percentage of announcements are delayed until the start of the business week? How close did this particular announcement come to being delayed to Tue…
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If society was a rich person with 1 billion paying $1M in taxes, and a regular person with $50K income paying $10K in taxes, the rich person would have paid nearly 99% of all taxes. And yet, they would have paid a pittance compared to their income (not to mention wealth), and it would absolutely no impact on their purchasing power or lifestyle (where the 10K of the 50K could make the difference between having savings…
Is the purpose of taxes to fund the government or punish the rich? Because if it’s the former, then looking at the share of taxes paid by billionaires is highly relevant. In the US, billionaires make just 1.3% of all income. 80% of income is earned by the bottom 99%. Confiscatory taxes would definitely achieve the second purpose, punishing the rich, but would have little effect on how much taxes ordinary people would…
Government exists because of and for society, and the purpose of taxes is to create the greatest net benefit to society.
Taxes are not to punish anyone, they are levied to fund services for society. Determining the optimum rate is complex and open to debate. But fairness is entirely irrelevant to the question. Whether the top marginal rate is 10%, or 90%, it should be whatever maximizes the usefulness to society.
We have a capitalist economic system, and it works pretty well for us, but that doesn't mean anyone has an inherent natural right to their capital. When it comes down it, property rights are all fictitious and exist only because society says it does. It's hardly wrong for society to decide to recoup some of what it has created.
I think this “vilify the rich minority” mentality that’s so popular these days is destructive in the fact that the people that popularize this, see it as a path of least resistance to getting subsidized at the expense of the rich, instead of working toward improving themselves and the value of the products/services they provide so that they may, in return, purchase valuable services for themselves. In the end when th…
That is correct, the rich don't pay any taxes at all (whenever the can). The was a recent thread on HN regarding tax audits [0]. What I got from that is that the IRS cannot afford to audit the rich because their taxes are complicated and they don't have enough resources to do so. They choose to audit the poor instead because, it is simpler.. link [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21176705
Careful. The two articles rely on vastly different cherry-picked definitions of who counts as rich, and neither claim is even remotely true anymore if you use the other definition. The top 1% are indeed audited at about the same rate as the working poor, but they also pay higher taxes than everyone else. This NYT article on the other hand picks out the top 400, who apparently pay lower taxes but are much more aggress…
One of the most important things to understand about tax discussions is that there are two broad classes of "rich" -- high paid salaried employees vs. wealthy investors.
When you see claims like "the top 20% of people pay most of the taxes", that's mostly the high paid salaried employees. Cardiologists making six figure salaries pay high tax rates, and there are a lot of doctors and lawyers and engineers in the population, so they pay most of the taxes.
When you see claims about rich people paying low tax rates, that's corporations and wealthy investors hiring accountants to minimize their taxable income.
The distinction is really important because it means the problem isn't marginal rates, it's the complexity of the tax code which allows people with large fortunes to game the system. A simple VAT with some kind of dividend/UBI to make it more progressive would eliminate most of those games. It would also mean that individuals wouldn't have to file tax returns at all, which would save hundreds of millions of man hours every year.
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> Is the purpose of taxes to fund the government or punish the rich? Obviously it should do both. Joking aside, if the purpose is to fund the government as good as you can (that is, societies central pool of resource to be able to produce democratically controlled and publicly available "nice stuff") then it makes sense to take as much as you can from the rich (which can afford it) and a normal amount from the averag…
Property beyond a certain level should be taxed way worse than income. It's just hogging resources from society This is an argument for taxing consumption, not wealth. If I have $100M sitting in a bank account it isn't consuming any resources at all.
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> The vast majority of other income is taxed in the year it is earned, so there is no/minimal inflation. but our annual raise are often in line with inflation should they be excluded? what about sales tax, thats directly effected by prices going up, should that be excluded to. and what about the receivers of these payment, its the hotdog I paid for is taxed already then why should the vendor have to pay tax again? th…
> but our annual raise are often in line with inflation should they be excluded? This misunderstands the point of indexing gains for inflation, or applying a lower rate to income that is mixed with inflation. The point is that you pay tax on the income in the year it is earned (or soon thereafter). It doesn't matter what the money was earned for, whether you got a raise, or anything else. The point is that it's all m…
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Property beyond a certain level should be taxed way worse than income. It's just hogging resources from society This is an argument for taxing consumption, not wealth. If I have $100M sitting in a bank account it isn't consuming any resources at all.
It could be out and working in the economy, instead of sitting, so, yes it does. Capital is a resource too...
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> How do you prove how long you've held an asset, so the appropriate inflation adjustment can be done? The same way you prove cost basis; if you have adequate records of one, you’ll pretty invariably have both.
Perhaps in the modern era, but less so in the past. The IRS also has a workaround if you can't prove your tax basis, which is to consider it all gains. That's a reasonable fallback for calculating gains, because if you don't have proof of basis, it's likely to be an older acquisition (and one which is more highly appreciated.) But the opposite is true for inflation adjusting, which would leave people with no records…
If lacking transfer documents makes the sale value “all gains”, then the inflation adjustment is irrelevant, since you are adjusting a zero basis value, which is still going to be zero if you do or don't adjust it for inflation, no matter what a amount of inflation has occurred.
The only place where there is even a theoretical problem is where there is proof of basis value but not basis date; this seems extremely improbable to occur in practice.
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The problem is that "tax rate" is an ambiguous term because different kinds of income at taxed at different rates. So, for example, if someone makes most of their money on dividends, then they pay capital gains tax, and it appears like they are unfairly paying a lower rate than everyone else. ...but that's not a fair comparison because it's a different sort of income, with a VASTLY riskier risk profile. Taxing it at…
In the end the real tax rate is simply government spending as a percentage of GDP. Everything else is just shifting around who pays what and when not what the average ends up as. In the US that’s 41.6 percent GDP which is in line with Canada at 42%: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending#As_a_per... PS: Either lower taxes on capital gains or allowing people to deduct losses is reasonable in the name of r…
Or just use a consumption tax, which is largely the same thing but a lot less complicated.