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A married couple collecting $2500 a month each has a gross income of $60,000. Trust me, 85% of it gets taxed.
No, when determining whether SS benefits are taxable, provisional income is used. Provisional income is calculated by adding up a recipient's gross taxable income (other than SS benefits), any withdrawals from tax-deferred retirement accounts, and 50% of Social Security benefits. So under your scenario, only $30,000 would be counted as provisional income from SS benefits.
Second, if it did pass, it would target the wealthy, and the wealthy are the ones with the expensive tax lawyers who would ensure so many loopholes that the tax wouldn't be anywhere near 70%.
Actually, the wealthy will change their behavior to avoid the 70% tax rate. They did the same when the top marginal rate was 91%. Very, very few ever paid that rate because the wealthy simply changed their behavior to not fall into that bracket.
You have to understand the kind of people who make up her district. I live only about 20 miles east of that district. The people are largely Hispanic, low education, and low income.
Poor people have always believed that the rich are undeserving of their wealth.
This is why poor people never have any qualms about stealing money from the rich.
Actually if you do some research many top economists agree witgh the 70% tax rate. It used to exist in te U.S. pre-Reagan and pre-deficit spending.
And many don't. For example...
Quote:
"The United States has by far the most progressive income, payroll, wealth and property taxes of any developed country. Scandinavian social democracies like Denmark, Sweden and Norway have quite regressive direct taxes, as do the Netherlands and Switzerland.
...The disparity is even starker when you bring sales taxes into the mix, as VATs are an extremely important source of revenue for most European countries as well as Australia and Canada
...This isn't an accident. UC Davis's Peter Lindert has argued in his book "Growing Public" that European social democracies were only able to develop the programs they did because they used efficient consumption taxes that didn't lower growth as much as progressive income taxes, particularly those on capital income. European countries needed tax systems that could raise a lot of money without hurting growth, and only regressive consumption taxes fit the bill.
...[Researchers] Prasad and Deng found that the progressivity of countries' tax codes is negatively correlated with the amount of redistribution they do. In English: The less progressive the [tax] code, the more progressive the system."
Pay close attention to what that scatter plot chart tells us... Note that the highest levels of government benefits and services are provided by countries (Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Belgium) in which taxes are flat (everyone pays the same tax rate) or regressive (shown as the negative values along the bottom axis, meaning a greater tax burden is placed on those with lower incomes). And note where the USA falls on the graph. The USA has the most progressive tax system and therefore is least able to fund social program "wants" like single-payer Medicare for All health care, because the tax base is too narrow and overly dependent on the top.
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