USA Facts – Federal, state, and local data from government sources • Hacker News Board

Re: USA Facts – Federal, state, and local data from government sources

#181

Post by BoiledCabbage » Tue, Apr 18, 2017, 6:49 PM UTC

xienze wrote: post #131

Joeri wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice a 20% flat tax on all people and corporations without exceptions and deductions would be more progressive than the current system. The wealthy pay very little taxes.

A couple things... The parent is talking about "progressive" as in "the tax gets progressively higher as you make more money", not in the "social justice" sense. The flat tax being regressive means that the poor would have to actually pay more in taxes than they do now, which is very little. That's seen as a bad thing. Obviously there are solutions to that in flat tax proposals. Second, "the wealthy pay very little t…

> Those making $250K and up are responsible for 51.6% of all income tax revenue. How much more should they be expected to contribute?

And this is what is so annoying about groups complaints about the wealthy paying taxes. The heavy reliance on misleading statistics.

The quote says a specific group pays 51% of all tax revenue and says it's way too much. Well did they collect 51% of all income?

An entire article that not once answers the most obvious question even though they clearly have the data to answer it.

And to be clear, I'm not talking about Adjusted Gross Income (which is the total after taking every possible deduction in the book), but actually gross personal income. The latter usually isn't reported. The former is which often is used to make percentages of taxes paid seem higher.

And I don't know the answer, it may even help their case - but the fact the most obvious stat question isn't brought up in arguments for why taxes on the wealthy are too high makes it easy to conclude these aren't discussions in good faith.

Re: USA Facts – Federal, state, and local data from government sources

#182

Post by nicpottier » Tue, Apr 18, 2017, 6:50 PM UTC

xienze wrote: post #131

Joeri wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice a 20% flat tax on all people and corporations without exceptions and deductions would be more progressive than the current system. The wealthy pay very little taxes.

A couple things... The parent is talking about "progressive" as in "the tax gets progressively higher as you make more money", not in the "social justice" sense. The flat tax being regressive means that the poor would have to actually pay more in taxes than they do now, which is very little. That's seen as a bad thing. Obviously there are solutions to that in flat tax proposals. Second, "the wealthy pay very little t…

> Remember: the truly wealthy can live anywhere in the world.

As an American who often lives anywhere in the world, I'd like to point out you pay US taxes no matter where you live. (though you do get a 90k income exemption, if you are talking about the "truly rich" then that doesn't matter a whole lot)

Re: USA Facts – Federal, state, and local data from government sources

#183

Post by weaksauce » Tue, Apr 18, 2017, 6:51 PM UTC

tertius wrote: post #152

xienze wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple things... The parent is talking about "progressive" as in "the tax gets progressively higher as you make more money", not in the "social justice" sense. The flat tax being regressive means that the poor would have to actually pay more in taxes than they do now, which is very little. That's seen as a bad thing. Obviously there are solutions to that in flat tax proposals. Second, "the wealthy pay very little t…

Just one simple example would be that there is an untaxed amount, let's say $25k (or whatever the poverty level is) and everything above is 20%.

That is still regressive. A truly progressive tax system would be similar to what we have now but with much fewer deductions that the affluent can use to lower their effective tax rate. (Oft cited that warren buffet has a lower effective tax rate than his secretary because of all the deductions and loopholes.)

Not to mention that there is a huge misunderstanding of how progressive tax rates work. A very affluent businessman was on tv saying they would essentially have no motivation to work if the marginal tax rate increased for him when Obama was campaigning. His idea was that the tax bracket above 250k per year would somehow affect his entire income if he earned more than that figure so he would only want to work until he had 249,999 dollars and then stop making money to avoid "making less money". Of course the marginal tax rate is the rate that your money is taxed above that threshold. In this case the tax rate would go from say 15% to 20% on the money earned after 250k. Let's say you made 260k that year. Your extra tax burden because of the marginal rate increasing would be 20-15= 5% on the 10k dollars. You don't get taxed an extra 5% on all your money made like that fellow thought.

Flat tax is regressive and sales tax is regressive.

Re: USA Facts – Federal, state, and local data from government sources

#184

Post by Cshelton » Tue, Apr 18, 2017, 6:51 PM UTC

Tloewald wrote: post #167

Cshelton wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you would have to look at the reasons why the government tax revenue did not increase when rates were higher. The rich are have mobility. They can move money around the world and at high tax rate levels, they'd be content on neither earning nor bringing back any of the money they make elsewhere. Let's take an example of Apple's $200 B sitting offshore. I know that's a corporate tax, but same principal. I don'…

"I don't believe the tax burden on the lower classes in the US has ever been lessened by increased rates at the top levels." Every dollar of extra tax paid by the wealthy is a dollar of tax that doesn't need to be paid by the non-wealthy. Your belief notwithstanding.

You missed what I said. I said tax rates, not what was actually paid, as you stated. The people at the top have the ability to move. Or when the tax rates were 90%+ on the top brackets, those people simply reported they made $249,999 that year as they have the ability to find other places for their money.

Sorry if that wasn't clear enough. What I originally said is very different than how you understood it. Even in your case though, you assume government spending stays the same. But it doesn't. As government rev. increases, you can bet they will spend their new money as fast as they can. No matter if the additional revenue is coming from lower or upper brackets.

Re: USA Facts – Federal, state, and local data from government sources

#185

Post by finid » Tue, Apr 18, 2017, 6:52 PM UTC

programbreeding wrote: post #151

Cshelton wrote: post #106

I'm seeing many things (if this data is accurate, which assuming it is as it's from all government sources) and trends that go against a large percentage of what the media on both sides are perpetuating. That is my first takeaway at a glance. My second takeaway at a glance is the giant problem that is Social Security. It's been said over and over, and the aggregation of more data into charts comes to the same conclus…

>A quick third take away seems to be the unprecedented rise in non-cash government aid (food stamps) during the Obama administration. The data is there, needs more analyzing of course. I'm not sure you can say it like that. It went up 2.13x from 1980 to 1990, 1.43x from 1990 to 2000, 1.93x from 2000 to 2010, and 1.07x from 2010 to 2015. There was a big jump of 1.93x from 2000 to 2010, but that is only 2 years of Obam…

You knew where he was headed with his comments, and thanks for countering with stats he should have looked at.

Re: USA Facts – Federal, state, and local data from government sources

#186

Post by xienze » Tue, Apr 18, 2017, 6:58 PM UTC

nicpottier wrote: post #182

xienze wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple things... The parent is talking about "progressive" as in "the tax gets progressively higher as you make more money", not in the "social justice" sense. The flat tax being regressive means that the poor would have to actually pay more in taxes than they do now, which is very little. That's seen as a bad thing. Obviously there are solutions to that in flat tax proposals. Second, "the wealthy pay very little t…

> Remember: the truly wealthy can live anywhere in the world. As an American who often lives anywhere in the world, I'd like to point out you pay US taxes no matter where you live. (though you do get a 90k income exemption, if you are talking about the "truly rich" then that doesn't matter a whole lot)

Not if you renounce your US citizenship, which is an option the truly wealthy have available to them (see: that Facebook guy).

Re: USA Facts – Federal, state, and local data from government sources

#187

Post by emodendroket » Tue, Apr 18, 2017, 6:59 PM UTC

It seems like a lot of the historical data is complicated by inflation (like the growth in productivity per capita is interesting, but how much is it in real vs. nominal dollars?), but at a glance it doesn't seem to be accounted for.

Re: USA Facts – Federal, state, and local data from government sources

#188

Post by tootie » Tue, Apr 18, 2017, 7:05 PM UTC

Cshelton wrote: post #106

I'm seeing many things (if this data is accurate, which assuming it is as it's from all government sources) and trends that go against a large percentage of what the media on both sides are perpetuating. That is my first takeaway at a glance. My second takeaway at a glance is the giant problem that is Social Security. It's been said over and over, and the aggregation of more data into charts comes to the same conclus…

SS will exhaust it's trust fund at some point, but it still has lots of revenue eery year. Last projection I saw was that if we do nothing to payroll tax or retirement age, we'd see a 20% reduction in payouts and it would remain solvent indefinitely. Seems like it only needs adjustments to keep working fine.

Re: USA Facts – Federal, state, and local data from government sources

#189

Post by tylercubell » Tue, Apr 18, 2017, 7:06 PM UTC

panarky wrote: post #17

This would be really powerful if it provided access to the original data sources. Imagine if you could analyze the results of public policy, with clean and detailed data, independently curated, without political or bureaucratic distortions. The US has 3,000 counties and 20,000 towns and cities, each one a petri dish of experiments in governance. Imagine what we could learn! From the NYT [1]: Want to know how many pol…

https://app.enigma.io/search

Re: USA Facts – Federal, state, and local data from government sources

#190

Post by gautamdivgi » Tue, Apr 18, 2017, 7:07 PM UTC

kzrdude wrote: post #141

xienze wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We would have a budget surplus if we actually made Social Security/other Gov. retirement program replacement actually sustain itself perpetually. What. A. Concept. The problem is that there are a lot of people who believe that SS isn't broken because you can simply increase retirement age, make people pay in more, and other assorted band-aids. SS will be "solvent" until it suddenly isn't, and people need to realize…

Retirement age must increase. People are living longer than when retirement pensions were first designed. It was easy to introduce, people weren't expected to live that long then and now they do.

This!!! I believe originally the retirement age was set way above the average life expectancy. Some information I had was that when it was first setup life expectancy was 55 yrs while you could collect SS at 60 years. If that is really the case then SS has been a ponzi scheme of sorts for a while but now that people are living longer the time to payback is coming. Second, I think sometime in the 70's or 80's accounting changes were made so that the budget deficits could be "hidden" with SS money (i.e. it was no longer an exclusive trust).