Raise my taxes by 10-15% (by increasing the tax rate at the upper brackets) and put that money towards taking care of people who aren't employed. Yes, my plans for buying a second home will be delayed, but I think I'd rather live somewhere where everyone was taken care of.
People keep claiming that they're in favor of that. In fact, ~50% of the U.S. population votes Democrat, so we should be able to extrapolate that ~50% of the U.S. population supports an additional "feed the hungry" tax. However, if they were truly being honest, they could easily donate 10-15% of their own income to food banks/red cross/etc. which would actually be vastly more effective in assuaging poverty than a tax increase, even if only Democrats participated. The fact that I don't see that being done makes me question the validity of those suggestions.
I don't see how this follows. Income is not evenly distributed across individuals, so tax isn't evenly distributed. So even if 50% of people donated 10-15%, that's no guarantee that it's the 50% of the high earners.
Also, philanthropy isn't a solution to systemic problems. It tends to focus dollars on the 'prettiest' problems -- it's not super attractive to donate to, e.g., portable toilet facilities. Aid programs ensure we're covering everything, including the ugly (or out of sight) problems.
> However, if they were truly being honest, they could easily donate 10-15% of their own income to food banks/red cross/etc. which would actually be vastly more effective in assuaging poverty than a tax increase, even if only Democrats participated.
I don’t see why this has to be true. I’m also not going to sacrifice my resources and be competitively disadvantaged because other people don’t want to pay taxes. I’m going to continue trying to vote for a government that reduces the wealth/income gap, but until the collective decides it and works toward it, it behooves me and my kids to play the game individually.
Yeah so that's an option to increase taxes and that does solve how we fund it. We would need to increase taxes more than that, and we probably need to increase middle class taxes to do it. We also would probably have to pay doctors less, which means we'll have created some loan issues. Again, we could pay those, but the money has to come from somewhere, so we'd be taxing the middle class to pay for medical loans for doctors, while also taxing them to pay the doctors.
That doesn't necessarily solve equality of care. Do we pay hospitals equally? Based on patients treated? Based on what is treated? Is getting treated for cancer in Beaumont, Texas the same as being treated for cancer in Cambridge? What about hospitals with poor outcomes - especially if those hospitals mainly serve minority populations?
This is an extremely complicated issue with a lot of side effects and at the end of the day you're going to treat one group or another unfairly to resolve it - and the group that is likely going to get the short end of the stick is the middle class who provides the bulk of tax revenue.
"Raise my taxes by 10-15% (by increasing the tax rate at the upper brackets) and put that money towards taking care of people who aren't employed."
That might be viable in states like Florida or Nevada.
However, the most populous states have upper bracket state+federal rates that exceed 50% - so that well has already been tapped.
California, as you may know, has identical treatment for simple income and capital gains income, so even that avenue for tax expansion has already been opened up.
> However, the most populous states have upper bracket state+federal rates that exceed 50% - so that well has already been tapped.
Hardly. The top marginal rate peaked at 94% in 1944. It didn't dip below 70% for the next three decades, either - and we still managed to have a golden era. We're hardly tapped out.
I am well aware of the historical tax rates in the United States and welcome any opportunity to point out that those very high marginal rates were put in place specifically to discourage and penalize war profiteering in WW2:
"The crisis of World War II led Congress to pass four excess profits statutes between 1940 and 1943. The 1940 rates ranged from 25 to 50 percent and the 1941 ones from 35 to 60 percent. In 1942 a flat rate of 90 percent was adopted, with a postwar refund of 10 percent; in 1943 the rate was increased to 95 percent, with a 10 percent refund."[1]
It's important to understand this historical - and exceptional - aspect to those marginal tax rates and not misconstrue them as a fantastically progressive tax policy.
Setting aside those exceptional, war-related circumstances, I am skeptical that income taxation above 50% is workable. One may indeed enact such a rate but even in the absence of (criminal) tax evasion, legitimate tax avoidance activities will keep us below that threshold - a threshold that I think many people associate with basic concepts of fairness.
The idea with this is that the employer is holding back money that would otherwise be remitted as tax dollars, IE: helps with employer cash flow. Those funds then become available to pay out as salary. So it’s a rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul scheme to hopefully keep the employer solvent just a little longer and thus keeping those employees from needing to file unemployment.
