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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

#421

Post by objektif »

rayiner wrote: post #418
xg15 wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And getting rid of preferential treatment of capital gains would risk departing from what’s become an international consensus. I think we need a better reason than "because everyone is doing it" here.

“A bunch of liberal democracies which compete with us economically have converged on an overall framework” is a pretty compelling reason to me.

Ah take examples from liberal democracies only if it fits your agenda. How about single payer healthcare system? Do you like that as well? It is very well established that it works well.

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

#422

Post by vertex-four »

walshemj wrote: post #401
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but that's not a fair comparison because it's a different sort of income, with a VASTLY riskier risk profile. Taxing it at the income rate wouldn't make sense. Ah yes, the riskiest activities of them all: investing in fortune 500, government bonds, index funds and inflating real-estate prices. They all count as capital gains.

Most of those are higher risk than interest on cash or TIPS (not all government bods are safe) ask the shareholders of Thomas Cook or Going back a bit Enron about risk.

Ask the people who worked for Thomas Cook about risk.

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

#423

Post by rsynnott »

kryogen1c wrote: post #417
Retric wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Dont tariffs on imports\exports make this not true? Or is simply true enough?

Those are also a tax; if you import a million dollars of something subject to a 10% tariff, you pay 100k to the government for the privilege.

One thing that complicates the above is that the US does tend to run a larger deficit than Canada.

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

#425

Post by chimi »

The role of government is to protect its citizens and their property. By that measure, the wealthy have a lot more to lose than the poor and thus receive a proportionately larger service from the government. They have more to lose if the government fails.

Thus, the wealthy should pay more for that protection. In fact, most of what the government does is protect the wealthy from the poor within its borders.

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

#426

Post by brlewis »

koheripbal wrote: post #313
rc_kas wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lower tax rate is indeed my definition of lower taxes. A lower tax payment is a different thing.

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 past, in the US, capital gains wasn't taxed at all because it was considered double taxation (since the investment was already taxed)

The same thing can be said about every tax ever. Every time you tax money as it changes hands, that same money has changed hands before and was probably taxed then.

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

#427

Post by rayiner »

walshemj wrote: post #405
rayiner wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without some concrete statistics, it’s hard to analyze that. A non-trivial number of officers have family money.

In the UK id buy that chaps joining the guards regiment their fathers /grandfathers did I kind of got the impression that the military isn't seen in that way in the USA and didn't have such a high social status

It’s not as high social status as the UK, but there are plenty of officers who come from relatively wealthy families. The officer corps skews upper middle class, with 40% of ROTC recruits coming from the top quantile of households in terms of income. (At Harvard or Stanford, 65% are from the top quantile.) The other major entry point for officers, the service academies, requires excellent test scores and two letters of recommendation from the Vice President or a Member of Congress.

By no means are officers all from wealthy families, but those folks are definitely over represented.

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

#428

Post by ScottBurson »

Shivetya wrote: post #188
tartoran wrote: post #3

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

Fortunately four states lost a lawsuit[0] attempting to overturn the 2017 Tax changes, specifically they went after the cap on deductions allowed that could be deducted off Federal taxes with regards to taxes paid to states and cities. In effect what they wanted was for their citizens to be able to write off a much higher level of state and local taxes against the Federal tax debt owed. This is how high tax states in…

Speaking as someone in a higher-tax state whose taxes went up as a result of the state tax deduction restriction in the 2017 tax bill, I wouldn't mind that if the difference were visibly going to help educate children in poorer states. Instead, it seems that a lot of it is being pocketed by people who already have a lot more money than I do. So although I can see the argument for restricting or eliminating SALT deductions, on the whole I still think the bill was terrible.

I don't think you should feel bad about accepting the EV tax credit. The purpose of that is to help jump-start the industry; restricting it by income level would have diminished the desired effect. I haven't bought an EV (yet), but I'm glad you have.

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

#429

Post by rayiner »

objektif wrote: post #421
rayiner wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“A bunch of liberal democracies which compete with us economically have converged on an overall framework” is a pretty compelling reason to me.

Ah take examples from liberal democracies only if it fits your agenda. How about single payer healthcare system? Do you like that as well? It is very well established that it works well.

I assume you mean universal health care. Single payer is just one way to do it, and not the dominant one. (The Dutch model, for example, is closer to Obamacare than it is to single payer.) But yes, I do think we should have universal health care. And we should pay for it the way other liberal democracies pay for it—taxes or mandatory insurance premiums on the middle class.

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

#430

Post by dragonwriter »

rayiner wrote: post #427
walshemj wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK id buy that chaps joining the guards regiment their fathers /grandfathers did I kind of got the impression that the military isn't seen in that way in the USA and didn't have such a high social status

It’s not as high social status as the UK, but there are plenty of officers who come from relatively wealthy families. The officer corps skews upper middle class, with 40% of ROTC recruits coming from the top quantile of households in terms of income. (At Harvard or Stanford, 65% are from the top quantile.) The other major entry point for officers, the service academies, requires excellent test scores and two letters…

> The other major entry point for officers, the service academies,

Of academy, ROTC, OCS, and direct appointment, I'm relatively certain that, unless things have shifted recently, the academies are the least significant source of commissioned officers in the US military overall, rather than the second major entry point.

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