How are any politicians supposed to appeal to you if your taxes are within a range that you are comfortable with?
Hereâs a bit of background on that:
Passed by the Kansas Legislature in 2012 on the promise of creating jobs, the provision allows about 300,000 independent business owners to pay no state tax on the bulk, if not all, of their income.
Indeed beyond stupid the way we did them. Definitely it should have been gradually phased down instead of jumping off the cliff and saying wait till you see the growth. Well we didnât see the growth.
Unfortunately the Bill Self LLC thing is true. A ton of people did similar things to avoid taxation.
Equal Protection exists to protect citizens and classes of citizens from discrimination, arbitariness, and hostility. It doesnât require absolute uniformity among citizens - else rich people would get welfare benefits in addition to poor people. Progressive taxation isnât arbitrary, discriminatory, or hostile legislation - thereâs a rational basis for it beyond being punitive towards a certain class.
I donât really have a great answer here other than we (the people) decided the govt gets to decide whats fair. We created the society we live in, and what it has become is entirely on us.
Of course it does. We created the govt and gave them the power to do it.
Question for you. Would you be opposed to taxing capital gains at the standard tax rate, then lowering the standard tax rate to something more akin to a flat tax?
Iâd personally be on board with that give/take for a flat tax.
I addressed that above.
You said they were âwinnersâ and you were a âloserâ (in the sense of playing the âtaxation gameâ). As a general rule, winners are considered to be better off than losers.
Again with the âtaxation = punishmentââŠWe wonât be able to continue this convo if we canât get past this issue.
Reasonable people can disagree on what the tax rates should be.
You and the baker are simply engaging in an exchange. I doubt very much if he âfeels rewardedâ any more than you (the purchaser of the bread) do.
I would be willing to contribute more; Iâm just not willing to throw the money off a cliff by âmaking an extra contribution.â
Really? If so, what is the crime being punished?
Reasonable people can be (and are) in favor of a flat tax. Unreasonable people declare that it is the only possible fair system, and that all other systems are âpunishment.â
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I disagree with you here, and so do many⊠many leftists. It is most certainly arbitrary. Hostile? I argue yes. Weâd have to parse between the legislation itself and the leftist rhetoric used to get elected to enact it.
Obama was obviously right, if you consider his comment in context.
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Maybe I am remembering a history lesson wrong, but didnât Republicans implement the first federal progressive income tax?
Can you think of a reason to structure taxes progressively other than to be punitive to rich people? In other words, is there an argument that progressive taxation is a good idea for a reason other than being hostile to the wealthy?
Class warfare in context is still class warfare. Shall we put âeat the richâ in context?
Here we have a man who has never had to sweat meeting payroll, deliver a product on time, deal with competition or any of the other 10,000 things a private employer has to do. Heâs lecturing the class of people who pay the taxes that fund this society heâs exhorting them about. They fund his whole public career.
The tone and substance of the comments come from a Marxist mindset. The rich have had more than their allotment. Too much success is theft from the common store. They should be thankful society lets them keep anything.
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Not sure what your point isâwhy you would think Iâm obligated in any sense to defend words that have nothing to do with me. At any rate, Iâll simply decline to do so.
And this invalidates his point how, exactly?
If you want to say that you found it off-putting to have someone who has never been a private employer making those comments, thatâs fine. Just donât claim that it somehow makes the comments wrong.
I think youâre way off the mark here.
Thereâs nothing remotely like this in the speech (at least not the speech I heard).
To reduce growth?
If the amount of taxes collected remains equal I donât see how a progressive system provides any advantage over a flat or excise based system.
There are other good reasons for progressive taxation:
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Progressive taxation plays well with lower income voters. Voters are always happy to tax and spend the earnings of others. Especially if their gains are portrayed as somehow ill-gotten and unfair.
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A large 70k page tax code (including case law) leaves a great deal of room for rewarding political friends and punishing rivals.
No. There should be no Capital Gains taxes. A person earns his money and is taxed on it. He then risks it by investing in a companyâs stock, which helps that company grow. He then succeeds and is taxed on it once again. That looks like double taxation to me.
Instead of everyone talking about how much taxes should be letâs first talk about how big and wasteful the US government is. Cut it down to size and then the tax bill will be less on all of us.
Simple.
If a person is taxed on their capital GAINS, it means (by definition) taxing money above and beyond what they invested. How on earth is that double taxation?
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Winners and losers regarding how much they pay AND you know that.
I donât mind and I fully understand. Your thought process has been influenced by your job and I donât blame you for feeling as you do. Mine has been influenced by what I do.
Agreed.
I said that if he sells enough bread etc. he feels rewarded by the profit. And that is a reasonable assumption. I can tell you that at the end of a really good year I feel like I have won something. Itâs a good feeling. I have sold products, helped people and have been rewarded. The punishment comes on April 15th when the tax man takes more than he should. And I know a lot of small business people and they all feel pretty much the same. We are not Warren Buffet billionaires. We are grass roots entrepreneurs who largely started with nothing borrowed took a huge risk borrowed heavily (multiple times for some), worked 12 hours a day 6 days a week and finally succeeded. It wasnât fun much of the time. Especially when the government steals almost 50% in taxes.
You are smart because the government wastes our money. It is a bloated pig that says âfeed meâŠfeed meâ and we the suckers feed it more and more and watch it continue to grow to enormous proportions.
I am not picking on Obama but how much did he waste investing in a solar company? A half billion? Other Presidents of both parties have done similar things. I hate it and Iâm sick of it.
If tomorrow there was a law passed that said for every dollar that I pay in taxes the US will pay down our debt with 50% of it I would not be complaining nearly as much. But they donât do that they just spend, spend and spend again. Itâs disgusting!!
Success is being punished. I am at the highest tax bracket because I have succeeded. Can anyone imagine a business person with a widget company who punished his highest producers by paying them less commission than the poor producers? HaâŠin the real world it doesnât work. And we live in the real world and our current tax system doesnât work.
We have a spending problem not a revenue raising problem!
I never said âall other systems are punishmentâ. I am saying that this all together ridiculous progressive tax system IS THE PROBLEM.
Read what I wrote once again. âThat looks like double taxation to me.â
Technically it isnât. But the money that you have already been taxed on has brought you a profit through your own person risk and who is right their greedy little hand out to steal 15%? The US Government. And what will they do with it? WASTE IT AS THEY HAVE BEEN DOING FOR DECADES.
Itâs sickening.
Ah. Well, since âsuccessâ is obviously not a crime, it follows you donât mean that taxation is literally punishment; youâre speaking metaphorically.
Ah. Another metaphor, then.