Re:1 in 4 Americans are jobless or earning poverty-level wag...
by pkaye on Saturday November 21, 2020 @10:09PM
(#25174618)
> Is it not the case that taxpayers in the U.S. can write-off interest on their mortgages? That's insanely regressive.
With the 2018 tax changes, a lot of the itemized deductions are capped and the standard deductions raised. I think I've read now that 90% of the filings are for standard deductions.
Re:1 in 4 Americans are jobless or earning poverty-level wag...
by seibelj on Saturday November 21, 2020 @09:42PM
(#25174463)
I agree that’s a handout to the rich that should be eliminated, although it was drastically curtailed with the expansion of the “standard deduction” which made it irrelevant for the majority of taxpayers.
The most hilarious thing of all is that Trump passed a tax cut, and one of the very few tax increases as part of it was to eliminate the ability to deduct state taxes from federal above 10k. The only people this affects are rich people in high-tax blue states. And the democrats are bitching and moaning to remove this, because again, no one likes paying taxes, even those who pretend to love tax increases https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/12/house-democrats-stimulus-bil...
My understanding is that it's all the deductions that make the US system on the whole quite regressive.
In any case US taxpayers don't appear to be getting good value for their money.
They do have a pretty insane military though...
The Economist article is paywalled so I can't read beyond the intro. But the headline is intriguing: "gov't spending is not." That seems to be me to be the crux of it; Canada's tax system isn't terribly effective and we've been running deficits for seemingly forever, but at least all that debt is on the whole focused on things like health and education; while the US has an absolutely huge debt that seems to produce little of value for its population.
EDIT: I'll add that Canada is no worker's paradise. Inequality here is still very pronounced, and the gov't is also involved in all sorts of stupid subsidies on failing industries, and seems unable to effectively build new infrastructure. And our housing market just gets more and more irrational every year.