https://taxfoundation.org/publications/latest-federal-income...
Mostly because it expensive to get around taxes, something the 1% of the 1% can easily afford.
Privately, I know how to make investment income go to zero if you have enough of it. It’s all rather fascinating. Really, the top 5% of the top 1% could do it. But if you have less than $1m income (or cap gains), then it’s likely not worth it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM
The top 1% had almost 40% of the wealth in the US, in 2012.
And that video is from 2012, from before Covid, now it's much, much worse, because since 2020 the top 1% have captured about 66% of the extra wealth created.
Sounds ideal to me.
HN is higher income bracket so they don't need the services the government provides- and have the arrogance to call it waste.
Rich people pay more property taxes.
Rich people pay own companies, which pay corporate taxes.
LA just enacted a wealth tax on 5m+ real estate.
My point is how many times have we been sold the concept of "if we just bond or tax X, we can solve problem Y". These always turn out to be Big dreams where billions get spent and nothing really gets better.
Look at the CA high speed rail diaster.
Look at this one... The government sold a bond for homeless housing and raided the money for another project. https://calmatters.org/california-divide/2021/03/california-...
We don't have revenue problems, we have spending problems.
Death tax
Top level income tax rates
Property taxes
Sales taxes
And for the self employed - estimated quarterly taxes
In order to use taxes to counter inflation (when it is defined as increas in consumer prices), you need to tax those who would otherwise spend most of the money. The most efficient way is to tax the upper middle class.
Edit: Forgot to mention the obvious, if this is how you feel, why isn't a higher sales tax on certain items ideal? People scoff at sales tax proposals because they'd target the poor, but sales taxes could be implemented progressively too. Tax new cars, smartphones, etc. More expensive items get a higher tax, reducing the impact on poorer people.
Inflation happes when there's an imbalance between supply and demand. MMT argues for increasing deficit spending to fund all sorts of social programs. It also argues that the purpose of taxes is not to "balance the budget", but rather to tamper the inflation that tends to follow overspending.
The alternative (increasing interest rates) doesn't work properly under MMT, since treasury bonds cannot have a real interest rate, or the deficit spending would eventually break down. That means that under MMT, purchasing power of consumers must be pulled back using taxation of various sorts, which only works if you tax the consumers.
The problem with MMT (the way I see it) is that adjusting taxes to regulate inflation is probably an even more painful approach for most people than using the interest rate.
Anyway, the fact you need to tax the actual consumers to fund social programs remains the same, even in more traditional social democratic/keynsian approaches, even if they use the interest rate to regulate inflation.
If you look at northern Europe (where I live), taxes on the middle class are much higher than in the US. They're also higher for the poor, but with the increased social benefits, free healthcare, etc, it matters less for them.
Oh, btw, a lot of the taxes collected ARE, as you propose, collected as sales or luxery taxes, as well as employers taxes (hidden income taxes) Where I live, the direct income tax is "only" around 45%. However, the base sales tax is 25%. The employers tax (tax on employers for paying salaries, in other words a hidden income tax) is 25% (if you make more than $100k). For some items, such as cars, fuel, alcohol, tobacco, cosmetics, sugar/candy, etc, there are additional taxes, often well over 100% of the base cost.
All-in-all, I suppose, out of the salaray budget that my employer allocates to me, 75-80% ends up as taxes, somehow.
And I'm middle class, not rich and not poor. If the left in the US really wants to have a European style welfare state, this is about the level that allows for that.
If given the facts about this, I doubt many American's would want to switch. On the other hand, few people over here would want to switch in the other direction, too, since they're used to the taxes and the benefits they buy.
Fairly similar to how at present they have done exactly the same thing and generally try to call it Keynesianism from what I can tell. They skipped the parts of Keynesianism that would involve spending less which I suspect is a contributor to the progression of 2000-2007-2023 where every 10 years the crisis gets bigger.
The situation is not that complex. We need people to, by and large, create at least as much value as they consume. There are enormous efforts to find an alternative to that basic balance by creating lots of money and they by and large aren't actually working.
Also the rich don't consume that much stuff in absolute terms, so taking stuff away from them can't help other people to an great extent. The taxing has to be on the middle class who do most of the consuming. There are no alternatives. Can't tax the poor because they have no money, and ironically can't tax "the rich" because although they nominally have money they don't own that much real stuff as a group.
Here is Elon Musks 1 billion dollars in taxes. With his 1 billion dollars we can fund a wide ranging web of wasteful bureaucrats, or we can let Elon use his 1 billion to fund a capital project that generates jobs, technological advances, and builds a product that can be exported worldwide so that there is a positive impact on GDP. I prefer 1 billion of Elon capital projects over 1 billion of government programmes Every. Day. Of. The. Year.