It's more complicated than that though, the income that is going to be taxed here isn't money that gets handed to the students to do what they want with, it is money that the university pretends to pay them and then gives to itself.

The sensible way to eliminate the special tax treatment would be to first change how the university does the accounting, so that a bunch of stuff that the university does for university purposes doesn't get imputed to the student as income.

This plan is not raising taxes, the total amount being collected ends up less. This is shifting tax burden from group X to group Y.

I would be in favor of collecting enough money to start paying down the national debt. But, only if that money is collected evenly across the tax base not simply shifted to tiny sub groups.

I think the part you're missing is that they support raising taxes on the very wealthy, not on college students who are barely scraping by as it is...

oh those poor poor Berkeley college students

The demographics of college students and graduate students are nothing alike, and the article is about graduate students.

53% of Berkeley students have under $30k a year of income and receive an average of $14000 in aid.

What are the 47% who make more than 30k a year doing, and going to school at the same time?

I worked in University IT and made over $30K working part time during the school year and full time in the summer, as did most of my coworkers. Also, we made slightly more than the normal person because Social Security tax is waived for working students, so that's like a 7% bonus.

When you're in the Bay Area and your students can choose to work for the University or go get a paid internship down the road, you have to compete on wages.

If they're undergrads that's probably counting their parents' income, not their own.

The outrage seems reasonable, not ironic or hypocritical. I want to pay higher taxes (and I do donate money to charities and NGOs), but I do not want my taxes to be used to cover for the tax breaks of the super rich. We are in this all together, and we should all work to make our world better.

You can argue that the government is bad at spending that money, but this is a completely separate complaint.

The rich already pay the lions share of income tax. How much more of their money needs to be taken from them to make it fair?

Also the argument that the government is bad at spending money is exactly the point. I would possibly be supportive of higher taxes if I thought the money would be used to pay for useful things.

To your claim about lion's shares: the federal tax code is progressive by a very slim margin, while state tax codes are regressive. Therefore, no, percentage-wise the rich are not paying more.

And the complaint is that this particular plan will let the rich pay less, not that the rich should pay more.

45% of households pay no income tax at all. I'm not saying taxes are fair or balanced or anything like that. I'm just responding to your claim that the tax code is progressive by a "very slim margin".

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/45-of-americans-pay-no-fed...

45% of households pay no or negative income tax at all. Remember some of them get more back than they would have paid, so negative taxes paid.

in 2014 the top 1% of income earners earned 20.6% of all income and paid 39.5% of income taxes collected.

the bottom 50% earned 11.2% of income and paid 3.45% of income taxes.

https://files.taxfoundation.org/20170201091804/TaxFoundation...

Federal income tax rates are highly progressive, but the total tax burden paid to all levels of government is only slightly progressive (and actually slightly regressive above the 99th percentile of income). WaPo published an article showing the total tax burden by income. The bottom 20% pay an average of 17.4%. It gradually increases to around 30% for the 80-99th percentiles then actually drops down to 29% for the top percentile. [1]

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2012/09/19/heres...

I thought that "progressive" and "regressive" refer to what percentage tax you pay given what bracket (in dollars, not in percentile) you are. I would have thought that the 45% mentioned in the article is proof of how many Americans are poor, not that the tax plan is progressive.

Even with a moderately regressive income tax the rich will be paying more total tax even though they are paying a smaller percentage of their income as tax. Therefore you can not make any conclusions about the fairness of a tax by saying that the top 20% of earners pay 80% of the total amount of income tax (it would have been absolutely crazy if this was not the case, unless everybody had the same income).

As such, I do not see how this article can be used to say anything about whether the tax is progressive or regressive (and as you mentioned, whether it is fair altogether).

They are not well defined terms and are meant more to evoke an emotional response. Progressive does mean that you pay at an increasing rate the higher your income is. A flat percentage tax (example everyone pays 18% no loopholes) should be neither progressive or regressive but most US liberals would still call it regressive because it would be if you consider the current rates as a baseline. A truly regressive plan would actually decrease rates as you went higher in income. Neither Federal or any state that has income taxes has a truly regressive tax schedule.

Edit: I suppose if you figure in sales taxes into overall tax burden you could call some states regressive. But that is not a feature of their income tax rates.

Yes, and the top earners pay 396% more of their income than the bottom as far as federal income tax is concerned - this is traditionally understood to mean it's highly progressive as a system.

Only if you ignore Social Security and Medicare which add up to 15.3% income taxes paid by all working people making federal taxes more regressive than you might think.

What do you mean by a very slim margin?

If you believe that the regressive nature of state taxes balances the progressive nature of Federal, do you believe that state income tax collects as much as Federal, or are you simply counting them equally because they are both types of taxes? If the latter, why would you say that the rich don't pay more, percentage wise? If the former, why do you believe this?

I believe they are counting all taxes, not just income taxes. Sales and excise taxes often hit the poor very hard. On average, across all states the bottom 20% pay 10.9% of their income in taxes while the top 1% pay 5.4%. In Washington, which has no income tax and a high sales tax, the poorest 20% pay 16.8% of their income and the top 1% pay only 2.4%. [1]

[1] https://itep.org/whopays/#The%2010%20Most%20Regressive%20Sta...

> The rich already pay the lions share of income tax. How much more of their money needs to be taken from them to make it fair?

To make it fair, we take the means of production: ownership over companies, facilities, land.

Any more the largest "owner" of most publicly traded companies are mutual funds that are in turn owned by 401k/IRA accounts. So teachers, firefighters, police, union workers, office workers, government workers.

So basically you got that already.

This isn't really that unusual since most of these students to tend to have low incomes when they'd be affected by this. What is funny though is how upset people were about potentially losing the ability to deduct state and local taxes, which is something that would predominately affect upper middle class people living in blue states who tend to support tax increases. Just on richer rich people than them, apparently.

It seems reasonable to be against taking away tax deductions for state and local taxes; you're asking to be able to deduct taxes paid to a government. As a counter-example, it's also legal to take deductions for foreign taxes paid on foreign income. And plenty of lower-income people also pay state and local taxes.

It's hardly the same thing as taking away, say, the mortgage interest deduction.

Everyone thinks he pays his fair share of taxes. It’s that guy down the road …

Well, that's because everyone is undertaxed but me.

Generally most people regard it as unjust to charge income tax on money that is never made as income.

I'm pretty sure this is false. That's why folks don't use barter in order to increase their buying power by a third. Even if dollars didn't change hands, the value of what did still counts for your taxes.

Even campaign finance laws reflect this. Suppose you're an airline and you write off the costs of a candidate's tickets when he flies around the country campaigning. The value of those tickets must be recognized as a campaign contribution.

>Even campaign finance laws reflect this. Suppose you're an airline and you write off the costs of a candidate's tickets when he flies around the country campaigning. The value of those tickets must be recognized as a campaign contribution.

Ah, but you don't write off the costs of airplane tickets for the cabin staff, which is what would really fix the analogy here. Grad-students are serving as employees and trainees of their advisors. In industry, you would never, ever ask a trainee to pay twice their wages in "training costs" to their employer. They'd leave, and never look back.

I agree with people in the other thread that we really should find a way to end the legal fiction that PhD students with "tuition waivers" are being charged or paying any tuition at all. They're something between interns and entry-level employees, except of course that charging interns for the internship remains illegal.

Perhaps there are really two separate relationships between the school and the grad student, and we're confusing everything by conflating them. On one hand they're acting as researchers and TAs, and being paid (a pittance) for that. On the other hand, they're students buying educational services from the school, which they're putatively paying for out of their compensation package.

Well, if we want to fix that, we could rework our degree system to function like the European one. Over there, a Master's is a mixture of coursework (and research for more ambitious students), while a PhD requires a Master's to enter and has the legal classification of an entry-level job, with work duties but few to no courses.

Probably because they support taxes on actual income, not taxes on money they've never seen.

arguably, the tuition being waived does have a value and is given as part of employment compensation. How would it be any different that if my employer provided a free gym membership, which is considered taxable income even though it is money I never get.