Majority Of Americans Support Raising Top Tax Rate To 70%

zerohedge.com/news/2019-01- … ax-rate-70

Well of course the rich are going to flee to an easily accessible neighboring European country for refuge. Such tax has to be implemented across the whole of Europe, wherever the euro currency applies; just like such tax would need to be on the whole of the US, wherever the USD applies, or else businesses would flee from the high-tax state to a state that is more willing to prostitute its people while retaining ease of trade with the former residence.

France’s problem is being dumb enough to think the people can pay their own welfare and they should immediately remove all taxes on anyone remotely close to poverty level, and their top rate cannot exceed the top rate of any other European country lest they spark an exodus of capital. If the Europeans wish to raise taxes, they will have to do it in unison to avoid asymmetries among member states.

The main purpose of taxation is redistribution and it makes no sense to take from the poor to give to the poor (minus some profit for the service) so the poor shouldn’t be taxed at all, and that includes sales tax. Sales tax is THE most socioeconomically harmful tax. All flat taxes are worse than counterproductive and most heavily burden the ones least able to afford it.

People are smarter than I thought. Go Ocasio!

16,000 people irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/16inintaxreturns.pdf

0.005% of the population.

The tax-avoidance argument only serves to embarrass those delivering it by exposing ignorance of empirical historical data:

Data for 1916-1933 irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax- … me-reports
Data for 1934-1953 irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax- … ort-part-1
Data for 1954-1999 irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax- … rn-reports
Data for 1996-2016 irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax- … ax-returns

It was a pain in the ass entering all the relevant data into excel, and I only did every 5 years (1916 and 1920 - 2015), but here are the taxes actually paid into the IRS divided by the income reported to the IRS for each income group:

From shortly after 1930 to shortly after 1980 the rich paid effectively and essentially half their income in taxes, according to my calculations, which I invite everyone to verify.

The moving average of Real GDP Growth was slightly higher back then niskanencenter.org/wp-content/u … verage.png

And that’s even more significant considering GDP was calculated less liberally back then. Nowadays they’re looking for ways to massage the number a bit higher.

Here’s the shadowstats verion of GDP which shows a recession since 2000 shadowstats.com/alternate_da … uct-charts

Same can be said of the unemployment rate bourbonfm.com/sites/default … 8-2015.png

And the shadowstat version puts employment into perspective: shadowstats.com/alternate_da … ent-charts

That was back in the days where wages were the highest in he world, quality was the highest, one man could support a wife a kids while still saving and having no debt and having the house nearly paid for… and they bagged your groceries and pumped your gas. That’s the MAGA days Trump wants to return, but he’s recreating opposite conditions, conditions which preceded the 1929 crash, where taxes were low on the wealthy and income inequality was highest.

If not for the staggering explosion of debt since Reagan, the economy would already be unsustainable.

Yes, of course taxing the rich reduces inequality. That’s been studied extensively:

wealth divide.jpg

INCOME AND WEALTH INEQUALITY: EVIDENCE AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/SaezCEP2017.pdf

The objective morality objection:

The moral appeal of the taxation-is-theft argument is overshadowed, both in quantity and degree of suffering within a constituency. If taxation is indeed immoral, then the only moral action is to eliminate all taxes, which eliminates all government assistance, so how can a moral action result in an increase in suffering? And what about the military? Does one have a moral obligation to defend ones country? How about the vets?

Who wants to argue the other side of this?