This is one of the most short-sighted views on taxation I've ever read.

Tax enabled the infrastructure and social structure that made your income possible in the first place.

Tax is a fee that the government uses to invest in its country to stimulate economical ans social development. Paying tax will in the long term benefit your net. income.

Effectively, the 'poor person' is netting $80,- for their time. The 'other guy' nets $90.000,- for their time. Those are the only figures that count, and they look very bad for the 'poor guy'.

Some people think they are 'better' persons because they pay more taxes. I argue, they are persons who took home way more income: the tax is just a fee that they pay for being allowed to live and work in their country. The price for the opportunity that they received to earn $100k.

If you feel "better than others" because you pay more taxes, you are a very sad individualistic person.

Why do you frame work as a reward and not a chore?

Yes, contributers are better than freeloaders.

By your logic, a dog walker is equivalent to a doctor, and given only enough resources to save one of their lives, we should toss a coin.

>Not only are poor people not contributing (by definition of being poor), they're also convinced their tax contribution is too high.

By this logic sending a job overseas to lower paid workers makes the exact same job contribute less to society. It also means all unpaid work contributes nothing to society. This is particularly absurd with opensource software that generates millions or billions for big corporations.

Correct, once the labor pool is expanded to include those people, the value of the work is re-adjusted, since value is relative to all options available.

I did mention income being a rough approximation, implicitly acknowledging unpaid work. Yes, I agree that open-source contributions should be counted as charity donations in regards to taxes.

>Don't have $20k? Take out a loan and get another job.

hahahah oh my god hahahaha. Nah I can't even argue with this, it's so backwards.

?woH

Think of the percentages in terms of time instead. So, for example, a 20% tax means you work one day a week for the government and the remaining 4 days of the workweek for yourself. It doesn't matter how much you make during that time - it's a "best effort"-based system.

That's an insightful way to think about it. I just realized we're operating under large scale Feudalism?

Poor people work 1 day/week (or so inefficiently that it should be considered 1 day/week), and therefore should be paying a 100 tax. Exactly what I was saying.

Continued:

Poor person: "I don't buy from McDonalds because it's unfair their prices as a percentage of income are higher for me than for rich people."

That's how retarded it sounds to me hearing people talk about taxes as percent of income. Yet that's somehow the dominate narrative.

Good point. Does the poor person have a choice not to eat? To not pay for health care? In your attempts at sarcasm you quite clearly indicate what's wrong in US society.

Yes, those are choices.