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Old 06-13-2007, 11:36 AM
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Gatac Gatac is offline
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People always advocate new taxes - for other people.

...

Sorry, it's just been my observation that it's often "Tax the rich!" when this comes up, and this leads me to ask how that can be justified. The rich are already in the highest tax bracket, and the tax percentage means that they in effect already subsidize people who earn less. After all, on the axiom that you don't want to spend much more money on exactly tracking who does what, it can be assumed that all people will use roughly the same amount of resources and services as provided by the state, so the "fair" solution would be to take the total costs of the government divided by total taxeable population and let everyone pay the same amount to cover it. Of course, then you get the problem that 5000 bucks (figure grabbed from thin air) is peanuts for some and unpayable for others. From that perspective, most modern tax systems aren't just unfair, but massively discriminate against rich people. Even if everyone was paying the same percentage, those with more income pay more money for the same services. Add the higher percentage of taxes for rich people and it just shifts the burden more.

Taxes aren't fair. The best you can do is try to spread the burden in a way that everyone can bear their part.

A radical solution would be to give everyone a certain lump sum of "allowed income" and keep everything above that as tax, but that is a) massively unfair b) against the spirit of capitalism and free commerce c) never going to be passed as law by any government, ever. (Well, I suppose you could pass it, but good luck keeping the big money inside your borders.)

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Rather than looking for innovative ways to tax the rich, how about looking into ways to close the gap between poor and rich? That's the real problem, imho.

Gatac
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