Funding public universities and giving them the mission to keep tuition costs low. Public universities are capable of providing enormous value to students, but over the past two decades their funding has been substantially cut. The result is that those schools became more reliant on expensive out-of-state tuition, which in turn means competing with private institutions for students, which in turn means building more luxuries (awesome gyms) and not focusing on value for money.

So, giving even more taxpayer money to the education cartel, then. Got it. Good luck with that. Over the past several decades staffing in administrative positions has exponentially ballooned all across the education system, starting with grade schools, while academic metrics moved in the opposite direction. Now the question is, do we continue setting even more taxpayer money on fire, or is there a better way?

==40.1% of US taxpayers on the low end of income distribution pay no income tax==

According to 2022 IRS data, average deductions for those who itemized totaled $43,686 in tax year 2022 [0]. The 2022 bottom two quintiles of income were under $44k [1]. That means in 2022 rich people AND poor people didn't pay income taxes on their first $45k of income. Is that unfair to rich people?

Worth noting, the 25 richest Americans paid an average effective tax rate of 13%, as of 2018 when IRS data was leaked [2].

==Top 1% (with the possible exception of a few billionaires) already pays through their nose.==

"While average effective tax rates barely changed in the US from 1945 to 2015, the average tax rates of high-income households fell sharply—from about 50 percent to 25 percent for the highest income 0.01 percent and from about 40 percent to about 25 percent for the top 1 percent." [3]

If the average effective rate hasn't changed, but the effective rate paid by the top 1% has fallen by ~40%, how is the difference made up? The 99% pay more.

[0] https://www.pgpf.org/article/7-key-charts-on-tax-breaks/

[1] https://data.census.gov/table/ACSDT1Y2022.B19081?q=income+qu...

[2] https://www.propublica.org/article/you-may-be-paying-a-highe...

[3] https://taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/effective-income-tax-rate...

What people don't discuss about the taxation is that rich people will universally pundit, preach, undermine, subvert, and squirm out of any law to tax themselves more. If you are preaching more taxes thinking it will affect the politically well-connected, it will be unwound and castrated by the politically well-connected. Or just deflected into somebody else's responsibility.

In that case, someone else is going to be holding the bill that you might not have intended.

I hate discussion of percentages, because every percentage seems reasonable by itself. It's the summation of the percentages that politicians have no interest in discussing.

In fact, it should be a requirement of government to sum the percentages of federal,state,medicare,social security, sales, resort, fuel, local levies, internet sales into one effective percentage that a given citizen in a given city has to pay.

Has anyone calculated that number for themselves? I've been collecting all my transactions and taxes to figure out what percentage of my income actually goes to taxes.