re: #379 Talking Point Detective

So I’m trying to understand your main point.

Do you think that it is unjust for someone making more money than 90% of his/her fellow citizens - and who enjoys a lifestyle in excess, materially, to probably 99% of the people who have ever walked the planet - to pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes?

It seems from your posts that you don’t think it would be more just for someone making $400,000 to pay a same percentage of their income as someone making 40K.

So, at some point, you have to reach a decision point in the real world. Given that there is a broad consensus that Bush’s tax cuts reduced revenue overall, and given that during a period of his tax cuts the income of the top income earners grew disproportionate to everyone else’s income, it seems that the current Republican policy platform is neither fiscally conservative nor “just.”

Do you disagree?

I don’t see how my posts can be read to say that those making more should pay only the same percentage. I said the exact opposite in one post above. I agree entirely with the basic point that higher incomes should pay a higher percentage.

I think tax rates will have to go up some, along with cuts in spending. We cannot go on as we are, spending much and collecting much less. I’m OK with stacking the tax deck yet more heavily against the high end earners. To a point.

Somewhere, there’s a limit. Putting the tax law back where it was before the Bush cuts, word for word, puts it back to where it never was, in real terms, because in the meantime, prices have gone up, while the provisions of the alternative minimum tax are not indexed in that law. They would go into force against incomes that today are not at all exceptional.

Surely we can agree that tax rates against any particular income level ought not exceed the rate at which maximum revenue will be collected once people have adjusted their economic strategies to whatever the new tax law is? After that, higher taxes are a lose lose game where nobody benefits.