> it's impossible to give a tax break to someone who doesn't pay taxes.

That's, of course, completely untrue in a world where refundable credits are a thing. Tax bills are not limited to non-negative numbers.

(Also, lots of non-rich people pay taxes, even if you only mean personal income tax.)

> That's, of course, completely untrue in a world where refundable credits are a thing. Tax bills are not limited to non-negative numbers.

I'm pretty sure that is actually the case in the US tax system. A US taxpayer's tax burden cannot be less than 0. It doesn't have to be that way, but to make it so requires a more fundamental change to the US tax system.

Nope, there are several refundable tax credits which can take total income liability below $0; the Earned Income Tax Credit is the best known , but there are several others.

https://www.irs.com/articles/refundable-vs-non-refundable-ta...

>That's, of course, completely untrue in a world where refundable credits are a thing. Tax bills are not limited to non-negative numbers.

Tax breaks and one's total tax obligation are two different things.

>(Also, lots of non-rich people pay taxes, even if you only mean personal income tax.)

A lot of people think they pay taxes, but they don't. And we'd need to define rich to really reach an agreement on the truthfulness of that statement. According to the CBO [1] (table 1 on page 31), households in the lower three quintiles of income are not net tax payers at the federal level. The gap in what they pay and what they receive in services is large enough that it offsets state and local taxes.

Reviewing the table I referenced above, I would agree that lots of non-rich people pay taxes. But the majority of non-rich people do not.

[1] https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/114th-congress-2015-...

Let's say a person makes most of their income from exporting equipment to Europe. Are you going to subtract the value they receive from the US Navy protecting shipping lanes?

What about the value the owner of a retail store gets from the interstate system?

Only counting direct benefits in this calculation is absurd.

This is too simplistic to be real. Would you say the same if the tax break was "anyone earning over $500k pays no taxes of any kind"? After all, it primarily affects the rich, and that's to be expected.

Of course I'd not say the same, that's a very different situation than across the board reductions.

In a country where 47-50% of tax returns have zero income tax liability, and 60% are not net tax payers, a new policy that lowers the tax rates across the board, but has a floor of zero, will obviously only affect those who have actually pay taxes.

Another question I would be interested in hearing an answer to is why is everyone so concerned about tax breaks for the rich? Since the federal government doesn't operate on a balanced budget, the only motivations I can see are greed or spite. Greed because people are afraid they will not get services paid for by someone else, or spite because they think it's unfair that someone has more than them.

In case you haven't been following the news, the recent tax bill was passed under a rule that limited the impact it was allowed to have on the deficit. Therefore, in order to make tax cuts for the rich not cost too much for the bill, they've included changes that remove funding from services or that raise taxes from the not rich. It doesn't matter whether the government as an abstract operates on a balanced budget or not, this particular bill is a (roughly) zero sum one. If you didn't know that, you should really do some more background reading.

> is uninteresting because it's impossible to give a tax break to someone who doesn't pay taxes

Friedman was really into negative income taxes.

Anyone who has a job pays FICA taxes. They could easily have lowered those for low income people, but they didn't.