

Not All Money Is Created Equal - taxes of the poor, middle, and rich - limist
http://www.politicalmathblog.com/?cat=50

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hga
" _If the top 1% of income earners make 27% of all the money, it would be
perfectly reasonable for them to pay 27% of all the taxes._ "

Actually, no. What are they getting in return for that?

Past a certain amount, it doesn't in aggregate cost any more for the
government to support the needs of any one person. When you tax people beyond
that point, you're explicitly engaging in redistribution and that is a
debatable point, not something that is "perfectly reasonable".

To take a real world example, a foreigner can go to a canton in Switzerland
and do a private tax treaty with it, where he e.g. pays a fixed amount of tax
each year. The cantons that do this are stating that it doesn't cost them any
more than that sum to cover his costs to them.

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indiejade
_Actually, no. What are they getting in return for that?_

Actually, yes, I think it is reasonable. The top 1% earners typically are CEOs
of large corporations, celebrities, or professional athletes. In any event,
their brands put more strain on the overall infrastructure than a little
janitor who is in the bottom one percent of income earners.

The CEO of Wal-Mart has, at any given time, thousands of delivery trucks on
the roads, trucks that contribute to traffic congestion, increase the risk of
accidents, cause potholes, and spit out harmful emissions into the atmosphere.
The negative externalities born by society can be assigned a cost, and (even
though it's by far from a perfect system), it does make sense for those who
use/abuse the system for personal profit to be taxed more.

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hga
I'm sorry, but your concrete argument doesn't work unless you're suggesting
that the CEO of Wal-Mart gains the entire benefit of its actions, with none
benefiting its shareholders, customers, or low rank employees.

To take your even more specific example of delivery trucks, _someone_ has got
to deliver the food that everyone eats. You can't arbitrarily assign the total
resultant negative externalities to whichever companies own and operate them.

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indiejade
3\. Michael T. Duke, President, CEO, and Director, Wal-Mart $12,238,209 total
compensation

6\. Eduardo Castro-Wright, Vice Chairman; President and CEO, Wal-Mart Stores
U.S. Division $9,987,493 total compensation

8\. Thomas M. Schoewe, EVP and CFO, Wal-Mart $9,477,584 total compensation

16\. C. Douglas McMillon, EVP; President and CEO, Wal-Mart International
Division $8,191,857 total compensation

Four out of the 20 "Highest Paid Retail Executives" are Wal-Mart executives.

Source:
[http://www.risnews.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=&nm=&type=...](http://www.risnews.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=&nm=&type=MultiPublishing&mod=PublishingTitles&mid=2E3DABA5396D4649BABC55BEADF2F8FD&tier=4&id=19710C99B6A541E09B4B506CDD05844C)

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hga
And your point is?

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indiejade
_To take your even more specific example of delivery trucks, someone has got
to deliver the food that everyone eats. You can't arbitrarily assign the total
resultant negative externalities to whichever companies own and operate them._

Why not? There's a big difference between retail and food, especially in the
US. Food can be grown and delivered locally, and agriculture can be optimized
for certain climates. Retail products, however, almost always require far more
distance had between the producer and the consumer.

Roads are a great example, because even after that cargo hold of plastic GI
Joes "Made in China" lands on the coast, Wal-Mart trucks still have to drive
hundreds or thousands of miles get the product delivered to its target
consumers in rural "agriculture" lands on the interior of the US.

Wal-Mart is the extreme example, but if I remember from my MBA classes, it's
fairly simple to point out where the company has exploited almost everything
it could legally exploit. It undercuts competitors in almost every one of its
new locations; predatory pricing puts mom-and-pop shops out of business. How
is this a good thing?

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sokoloff
Lower prices to the consumer is the most obvious answer to your last question.

Either you take as a given that people will buy that GIJoe from China or they
won't. If they will, some company is going to provide it; in your case it just
happens to be Walmart. If the consumer won't buy it, no retailer will provide
it.

If your argument is that we should attempt to assign economic penalties
(taxes, if you will) on the externalities such that the true cost of those is
reflected in the fuel that Walmart (and everyone else) buys, I'm all for it.
If you're suggesting that the most appropriate way to correct for those
externalities is to raise the income taxes on the Walmart execs who appear on
the "top 20 retailer execs" list, I don't see even a tenuous connection with
which I can agree.

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vaksel
when have "taxes" become a dirty word. Hell we had 90% taxes in the 50s and
supposedly that was the most glorious time in United States history.

In fact if you compare the tax rate for the top earners with the overall
American economy, you can see that the lower the taxes for the top brackets,
the crappier the economy tends to be. And sure correlation does not mean
causation but still.

Honestly I don't think most people would mind getting taxed at a higher rate,
as long as the money actually went somewhere positive. To lower the national
debt, to fix this country's infrastructure, to do the whole single payer
health care(not the abortion that they are currently trying to implement). The
shittier the economy, the more necessary it is to have a social net that'll
help people get back on their feet.

I mean, seriously, the country is 11 trillion in debt, and because of this
taxes = political suicide meme, that number just keeps getting bigger and
bigger.

And I'm not proposing raising taxes on everyone...but if you make more than 1
million a year, anything above that can be taxed at 60-70%(with the exception
of funding startups...which gets you a tax write off)

Edit: if you are going to downvote, at least have the balls to make a reply.

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dantheman
I think you are mistaken, income taxes are horrid and make you a serf to the
state.

The income tax was started in 1913 (not counting the civil war) and was high
till the late 80s. Now during that time most of the industrialized world was
destroyed by wars and America was able to prosper significantly -- as global
competition picked up we were no longer competitive. It has nothing to do with
high income taxes.

The country is in 11 trillion dollars in debt because it spends money it
doesn't have on things it shouldn't be spending money on. 90% of what people
need from government is handled at the local level -- @ the federal level we
have national defense, immigration, and the federal judicial system. After
that there really shouldn't be too much (SS, Medicare, and Medicaid should be
at the state level if at all).

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pauljonas
A deceptive and disingenuous presentation of tax burden on Americans.

Doesn't take into account state and local taxes (sales taxes, auto
registration, etc.) that are regressive in nature.

Also, it can be argued that those well endowed should incur greater tax fees —
after all, it is they that have more stuff to protect and defend. What about
costs that all pay (subsidies for stadiums, roads, public works, etc.) that
overwhelmingly benefit the affluent.

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skushch
How do subsidies for stadiums, roads and public works 'overwhelmingly' benefit
the affluent. A poor person with no car benefits from roads, unless they never
leave the house and somehow grow all their food and produce all their goods.

~~~
pauljonas
Because they are less likely to use them. They tend to be more likely
clustered in urban areas, less likely to own vehicles (and less vehicles on
average) and served by public transportation (trains & subways supported by
fares and charged with being self-sufficient) that receives far less in
subsidies than roads which are built on the federal dime.

On food delivery and utilities, more externalities imposed by exurban users
(more affluent) than urban users. New York City residents are much "greener"
and use far less energy than country/exurban dwellers, despite paying for the
same Kw at a much more exorbitant price.

Stadiums and public recreation areas are frequented by the affluent, not those
living paycheck to paycheck (on average).

Also, I did not even get into all the upside down craziness that tilts tax
favoredness to the affluent, but you can check out writings of David Cay
Johnston (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Cay_Johnston>) who details
extensively how the wealthiest Americans enrich themselves at government
expense
([http://www.democracynow.org/2008/1/18/free_lunch_how_the_wea...](http://www.democracynow.org/2008/1/18/free_lunch_how_the_wealthiest_americans)).

I will cite one that he begins one of his books with — the burglar alarm
subsidy — each time police respond to an alarm (95% being false alarms), it
costs the public $50 or more ($2-3B per year), in essence a subsidy, and a
diverting of police resources away from other areas (that either go unmet or
result in additional costs and increased crime).

Note: edited because for some reason, keep thinking this forum supports
Markup…

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danteembermage
Important to consider here is the earned income and child tax credits. While
it's a slippery slope to start subtracting "benefits" in some fashion, these
seem appropriate as they are a direct cash transfer. With that in mind, the
highest 60% of wage earners pay _more than 100%_ of the tax burden of the
federal government.

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madair
Some obvious and high-impact taxes that this chart misses:

\- Property taxes \- Sales tax \- Tax-free executive perks

And of course, the discussion about fairness isn't taking into account the
large percentage of industries that trade in or are based on commercialization
of natural resources, nor a whole lot of other things like the large amount of
current wealth, as well as industrial and military power still held that was
originally bootstrapped or massively grown by colonization, slavery, and wars
of aggression.

Fairness discussions like these are worse than useless, they purport and
perhaps even intend to be amoral, but fall quite short and instead mislead.

[Edit:] Actually it isn't that they purport to be amoral, they can't be.
Fairness is intrinsically moral, and thus if you're gonna talk about it you
have to try a lot harder to bring in the real meat of the fairness discussion,
like for instance, where is all that wealth coming from. People are quite
worried about the lazy dude playing video games but getting a free ride from
"socialism" (an abused word if there ever was one), reminds me of the mote and
the beam.

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milfot
I just wanted to point out, two sentences in your edit actually cut directly
to the heart of this issue.

Is the base starting point for society moral fairness or at least its amoral
approximation of stability? The question of who benefits most (previously
discussed at length in the comments) obviously.. by definition.. is more or
less everyone.

Where does the wealth come from? the chicken or the egg? the farmer or the
chickens? I think it fair to say with the experience of the past few years
that wealth flows from the poor to the rich in boom times and from the poor to
the rich in bust times.

Who benefits from stability more taking this into account? Do I even need to
answer this question?

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MaysonL
The thing is, of course, that most of the income of the wealthy is _never_
taxes. How much income tax has Bill Gates ever paid? I'd be surprised if it's
anywhere near 10% of his wealth.

