Are the very wealthy paying their share?

[KrazyHorse]

Meanwhile, a 70% marginal federal rate could easily get to 73-74% with state and local taxes. Even reasonably short-term labor supply elasticities put you on the wrong side of the Laffer curve with rates like that (I remember calculating the peak as being somewhere between 60 and 65% for most empirical estimates I've seen of these elasticities).

Most tax cuts do not pay for themselves (at least not in any reasonable timeframe). When you start talking about a situation where workers only keep one dollar out of four, they do. Remember as well that this analysis discounts completely the welfare of producers and consumers of high-value labor...

[Kuciwalker]

Given that the marginal tax rate for bottom earners is negative already, I don't understand your statement.

If you don't count implicit MTRs...

[KrazyHorse]

Have you been drinking?

[Hauldren Collider]

Heh... well the deduction for charity is pretty important. That is money going for the good of the poor and of society. Not money going to a bank and a subdivision developer.

Says the person who works for a charity.

Eliminate tax scams now, get rid of the charity deduction

[Hauldren Collider]

Okay, I guess the focus can stay on raising taxes for top earners

****ing wannabe robin hoods

[Provost Harrison]

****ing wannabe robin hoods

You really have no idea of the importance of this do you? But then again, you are another spoilt brat from the Kuciwalker stable.

[Heraclitus]

http://www.forbes.com/2009/01/29/irs...americans.html

Is this good? I am pretty sure that KH would say that they should pay even less, since it is capital gains which makes the majority of their income.

What do others think?

JM

Assuming this would be a good thing (which I'm not convinced it is). How do you realistically propose taxing them?

[KrazyHorse]

If you don't count implicit MTRs...

Depends on the exact situation, but the people I'm talking about are below the phaseout for various programs...

[giblets]

Says the person who works for a charity.

Eliminate tax scams now, get rid of the charity deduction

****ing wannabe robin hoods

If you have a better way to promote human welfare than the rich giving away their stuff, let's hear it. The whole point in having taxes and a government is to deal with the fact that people care a lot more about themselves than others and tend to base their decisions on that. For that reason it doesn't make a lot of sense to tax charity donations because those are exceptions where the spending mostly benefits other people. Also, it makes sense to shift the largest part of the tax burden onto the people with the most money.

[KrazyHorse]

The whole point in having taxes and a government is to deal with the fact that people care a lot more about themselves than others and tend to base their decisions on that.

No.

[Dinner]

I'm lost as to what this means. Maybe I'm just not understanding sarcasm over the internet.

If the personal income taxes were so high, that would have mitigated their personal investment (if that's what you're referring to as investment) return obviously since they would have had less after taxes to invest. If, on the other hand, you're referring to what Oerdin said, and it's business owners taking less out for their personal income (or I guess shareholders agreeing to lower or no dividends) and instead re-investing retained earnings, that re-investing only has value to the shareholders/owners because it is hoped it will make money (expected present value calculations here). All it is is postponing the receipt of (hopefully greater) income which will be taxed. I could be wrong but you'd have to have expectations for lower tax rates in the future for what you and Oerdin said to make sense.

Al, they basically found nonmonitary ways to reward people. Perks were huge as were paid company trips for business meetings and other such things.

[-Jrabbit]

Here's a graphic being passed around the lib-o-sphere with the header "This is what Class Warfare looks like"...

[KrazyHorse]

Let's go through the list on the rhs (in order):

1) Estate taxes are yet another tax on investment, and are thus dramatically inefficient
2) Dump it. While we're at it, dump the mortgage interest tax deduction entirely
3) See (1)
4) A phaseout of itemization produces higher effective marginal tax rates in the phaseout region. On the other hand, the biggest itemized expenses are usually state&local taxes and mortgage interest, which should not be deductible. The ideal solution is to eliminate the writeoffs for these two categories for everybody (see (2))
5) Not sure why a corporate tax break is included in "tax breaks for the wealthy", as the effects are distribute between stockholders, employees and customers. Also, US corporate tax rates are so obscenely high, and worldwide taxation of US companies so aggressive that even without knowing what this tax break refers to I can assume it's probably a good thing
6) See (5) for "wealthy" comment. And no, if oil exploration is subject to different depreciation rules than other businesses it's probably not a good thing
7) See (6)
8) God, I hate carried interest treatment. Unfortunately, it's wrapped up in the general treatment of partnership income (which is difficult to segregate into labor and investment income)
9) I don't see why you shouldn't be able to write off punitive damages. They are no different from any other cost of business. If you want punitive damages to be higher then they should be set higher by the courts, not by some arbitrary tax treatment
10) No idea what this is, but it's probably bad
11) Again, we have to remember that increasing marginal rates comes at a cost

On the left hand side, I'm not particularly fond of many of those programs. If we want transfers to the poor then they should be in cash, not in kind.

[Hauldren Collider]

We hand out money to every sob story group simply because it makes us sad to see that not everyone lives in a crystal palace. The fact is that no on in the US is truly poor. If you are really into the whole redistribution crap, why aren't we redistributing to the people who actually need money--you know, Malawians, Bangladeshis?

[giblets]

That would be a better use of foreign aid money than buying weapons for Israel.