For every additional dollar I earn, I only get to keep 47 cents of it, just counting _income_ taxes. In reality, only high earners pay taxes. And high-salaried people are getting screwed under Obama's war against the most productive citizens.
Stop whining and blaming Obama; there's no war against productive citizens, you aren't a victim. You don't get to complain when you're among the wealthiest in the world that you don't get to keep enough money. 99.9% of the country makes less than you, have some fucking perspective and perhaps a bit of humility for gods sake.
Utter nonsense. Legal doesn't equal moral nor does it mean fair. Slavery was legal, that doesn't mean the slave owners deserved the profits from their labor (you apparently think it does). Legals means nothing more than we can't put you in jail yet.
Everyone gets to complain, you don't have a monopoly on it.
> when you're among the wealthiest...
Not everyone that is wealthy won the lotto. Some people actually worked for it (took risks, worked harder, etc).
> How about when you are the among the ones that took the most risk in life, the ones that worked the hardest
Ah, the just world fallacy and survivor-ship bias all in one. You didn't work the hardest or take the most risks, far more people who worked harder and took equal risks didn't get lucky.
The formula for success has more than the single variable of luck in it. Luck plays a part, but so does allot of other variables.
That's a straw-man, I didn't say it's "just" chance and it's called a fallacy, not a narrative, and it's a fact, not false. It's a cognitive bias all humans have to attribute their success to their own efforts, and that's what's false.
If that were for all taxes, and the marginal rate was still better for lower incomes, I don't think that sounds so bad. Sure, we humans always want to keep more of our hard work for ourselves, but pragmatically speaking I'd be okay if my marginal rate at 7 figures (which I'm nowhere near) was 53% in exchange for the societal stability and upward mobility my taxes could enable.
You sound as if you'd approve of a ~53% tax rate at an income level higher than your own, but not necessarily at your own level. For the sake of argument, if you were to work just as hard for every dollar at that level as you do now for every dollar, but simply worked that much more (so every dollar required the same amount of work), do you think you'd still be willing to only keep 47 cents of each dollar? Similarly, if you were earning 7 figures and wanted to help society / people in need, would the government really be your best choice in terms of bang for your buck?
Has anyone ever tried to make a serious attempt to analytically tackle this question? There are a lot of people that try to rank charities against each other in terms of effectiveness. Could the same be done with government? Or even some portion of government? I have absolutely no idea, but this seems like an interesting question.
I don't think so, just because the goods it provides are so numerous and muddled.
Take one example: the fact that if I sign a contract I will feel legally obligated to follow through on it. This provides tremendous social good (billions of dollars worth), but it's very hard to quantify exactly how much.
Then you have to figure out how much it costs to provide that good. Should you include the total cost of government? No, probably not, because that includes lots of other goods. But the direct cost of say the courts isn't enough because they can only function thanks to the explicit backing of law enforcement and the implicit backing of the military.
It might be useful to start with a comparative analysis for governments though. It's probably impossible to delineate and assess every good the government provides, but you can compare the cost of governance and standard of living between countries.
In such an analysis, I highly doubt the US comes out well. Personally, I am 99% sure that my donations to the Against Malaria Foundation provide more total social good per dollar than my taxes.
It's not so clear how much of a service the government is providing there. Do you eagerly sign contracts with people you suspect would cheat you if they thought they could get away with it?
Yes, especially you include corporations as "people." Without the rule of law, I'm quite sure that corporations would find even more ways to generally break contracts and not honor their commitments.
If you're donating to specific government programs, sure, some of those are pretty similar to charities (although you can probably find a more efficient charity in nearly any area of focus). But simply donating a dollar into the funding of the US government, and having it split the same way that all US government revenue gets spent, seems to me like an obviously poor choice.
And yes. I could write a check to the IRS, but it isn't about my $2000, it's about the cumulative revenue from taxing everyone in and above my income more.
Under the current tax code, people already have the ability to donate up to 50% of their income to charity tax free. How many people do you know who donate 50% of their income to charity every year?
Annual Income: 1,000,000
Your percentile is: 99.9%
Also, productive <> those that make the most money. Having worked on Wall Street, I know an entire class of mutual fund managers that I would argue are negative value to society given that they've underperformed their index benchmark for years yet are making millions of dollars a year for their active management "service".
You say that as if that's a problem.
What do you mean by this?
If so, it speaks to the higher income generating power you have in California that you can be taxed more there than elsewhere and it is still the optimal result for you.
Of course people who already have large sums of wealth should be highly taxed as well. But you cannot tell me that the state taking 50% of the income of someone who makes a million a year is too much, right?
Edit: downvote storm! When did HN become /pol/?
2) You have no idea what I do.
That means that someone valued my time, ability and labor enough to pay me for it. That is, the exchange took place because given the circumstance of my employer, my time, ability and labor were worth more to them than $1MM. I was just able to capture the $1MM portion.
The idea assertion 'I spend too much' absent any context is as meaningless as the assertion that 'the government spends too much.'
PS: the 'spend too much' situation is the one where the poster spends $500,000 on Bengal Tigers and blow.
Yikes. So scratch the 'absent any context'. Context was there I missed it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/30/business/economy/for-the-w...
If you consider the regular income tax its even much worse, currently the combined income tax rate in California is more than 50%