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Why should anybody have to suffer a confiscatory taxation rate? Is a rich person less entitled to his money just because he has more of it than someone else?
If I ran the world, there would still be taxes to keep minimal government services running, but there would most certainly be no income tax. The government has no moral right to the money that I earned.
I'm with the others who pointed out the same thing ... why not turn the question around and ask why the government is so freaking greedy?
The positin of the tax protestors is that a worker for wages has no "income"---a worker has traded days of life in exchange for money, with no net gain. That is part of the reason I oppose the income tax. I prefer a national sales tax. That way you pay $5,000 tax when you buy a new Hummer,and I pay $100 tax when I buy a rusty old Toyota, which seems progressive enough to me. IF there is only a national sales tax, it is a simple matter to be a tax protestor. Just don't buy anything.
At the bottom, the wage worker pays ALL the taxes. If I go to the dentist, the dentist would like to charge me $100, a fair rate, to fill a tooth. But the dentist is in a 35% marginal bracket, so he has to pay $35 of that in income tax. He just passes that along to me, by billing me $135. I'm in a 20% marginal bracket, so I need to earn $120 in order to pay the dentist. So I have just paid the income tax of both myself and the dentist, $55, which is more than half the original transaction. A transaction in which there was no "income" at all---just wealth changing hands, from my employer to the dentist, but I paid the fine. I pay the taxes of the Walton family, too. If they paid no income tax, they would charge me less for a widget. No, wait---I don't think the Walton family pays any income tax. If they do, they need a better tax lawyer.
What a grossly simplistic post.
The reason people are averse to taxes is because whenever you place an excessive burden on achievement to subsidize failure, it stifles the achievement to begin with. It's also a matter of fairness.
What moral obligation do higher achieving people bear to lower achieving people, given that most of their achievement comes from personal sacrifice? Yes, there will always be the idiot-sons inheriting the old widows cash, but most people who succeed financially do so through their own hard work and brainpower.
Contrary to the leftist myth that achievement can only be had if you're some sort of an "insider" or that it's impossible to achieve to a high degree without hurting (baby seals, blacks, Tibet, the whales- whatever), the people who do well do so because of the good decisions they make.
Why should the fruits of their good decision-making be taxed to subsidize things that are often times the direct result of poor decision-making? And just because people who are very successful are taxed in a higher bracket, that doesn't mean that they should simply accept that. Sometimes, the consequence isn't a fair result of the action in question, so you cannot simply dismiss it since the people who took that action had foreknowledge of it.
No, I believe that everyone should pay the same. Set the benchmark and whatever you make, you pay a percentage of that. Whether you make $1,000,000,000 a year or $100,000 a year, we all contribute alike. That way, there is nothing in place that punishes success, like higher tax brackets.
I wouldn't have any problem with eliminating ALL taxes for people in the lowest income brackets- say, under $30,000 a year.
I totally agree. It is not FAIR that anyone should pay more just because he makes more. I like the national sales tax idea too.
What I'd like is to see the government cut spending so we all could keep more of our money.
I dunno, but sometimes I believe that being greedy and being ambitious is the same thing.
I only know that I'm neither, which explains why I’m not financially wealthy.
I dunno, but sometimes I believe that being greedy and being ambitious is the same thing.
I only know that I'm neither, which explains why I’m not financially wealthy.
It's perceptive of you to make that nice dinstinction. There are many kinds of wealth.
I never claimed that ambition=greed.
I only stated that sometimes I believe that they are the same, but I know that they are not. Although they sometimes do overlap.
I don't know of anyone who says, "Hurray! I paid taxes on my income and only took home this amount!"
Everyone I know of complains about taxes - the more overtime, the bigger percentage taken out. It's not greed, it's just wanting to keep what you earn.
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Why are the rich so greedy?
I dunno, but sometimes I believe that being greedy and being ambitious is the same thing.