I haven't seen her tax table. At what income threshold do the high tax %'s kick in?
AOC wants 70% tax on wealthy
- Thread starter Horn6721
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I haven't seen her tax table. At what income threshold do the high tax %'s kick in?
Seattle Husker
10,000+ Posts
It was $10M or slightly less from what I remember. We absolutely need to raise that top marginal rate albeit it won't raise the cash the extreme left thinks it will. Not sure what the top rate should be.
Cuomo Announces $2.3 Billion Revenue Shortfall: ‘God Forbid If the Rich Leave’
"New York governor Andrew Cuomo announced Monday that the state is facing a $2.3 billion tax-revenue shortfall, and argued that the deficit can be attributed to the “diabolical” recently passed federal tax-reform package.
Cuomo blamed the loss of tax revenue, the scale of which was unpredicted by state officials, on a provision in the Republican-led tax reform package that capped state and local tax deductions at $10,000, depriving the wealthiest New Yorkers of a significant tax break that defrayed the high state taxes imposed by Albany."
CONGRESS passed a tax bill that capped state and local tax deductions enabling the federal government to receive more tax dollars. Cuomo calls it a diabolical scheme as a red herring to deflect New York's budget problems. So I guess he wants that tippy top tax and allow the rich to deduct all the taxes he wants to charge them for living in New York. Apparently they're all leaving New York (Atlas Shrugged?) for lower tax states.
"New York governor Andrew Cuomo announced Monday that the state is facing a $2.3 billion tax-revenue shortfall, and argued that the deficit can be attributed to the “diabolical” recently passed federal tax-reform package.
Cuomo blamed the loss of tax revenue, the scale of which was unpredicted by state officials, on a provision in the Republican-led tax reform package that capped state and local tax deductions at $10,000, depriving the wealthiest New Yorkers of a significant tax break that defrayed the high state taxes imposed by Albany."
CONGRESS passed a tax bill that capped state and local tax deductions enabling the federal government to receive more tax dollars. Cuomo calls it a diabolical scheme as a red herring to deflect New York's budget problems. So I guess he wants that tippy top tax and allow the rich to deduct all the taxes he wants to charge them for living in New York. Apparently they're all leaving New York (Atlas Shrugged?) for lower tax states.
I read an article where it said the combined net worth of the 400 wealthiest Americans was $2.7 Trillion. If we seized ALL OF IT we'd still have a national debt of approximately $18 Trillion assuming we put it all on the debt.
I'm not sure what she wants to do with the tippy top money. Does anyone have a static scoring estimate of how much it would bring in (assuming the rich just say, "Oh, no problem, here's 70% of my tippy top money) and what impact it would have on our nation (economy, government debt, social programs aka vote buying if it goes to able bodied adults)?
What? She doesn’t know the difference between Garth Brooks and Chris Gaines.
Horns11
10,000+ Posts
I don't think the purpose of the high marginal rate is to pay off the national debt. It's to fund pet projects. I think she's been pretty honest about what she wants to do with the money. Fund programs that reduce inequality.
Tax Policy Center said it would bring in $72B/year, at least at the beginning of it. It's not a ton but not chump change either, and could easily be partitioned into things like infrastructure and the "high tech" non-wall-related border security that Democrats seem to like since it's not a wall. Things like Pre-K, job training funding, and other Democrat ideas would obviously be pegged first by the House.
I think there are worse options out there for tax haters. They could just up the entire rate for the top 0.5 percent to something obscene like 60 percent and raise a trillion dollars pretty easily. Or do what Europe does and make it a "total wealth" tax instead of income.
It sounded like he was saying that the rich New York folk who are now capped from deducting their state and local taxes are moving out.
Taxing the higher earners won't raise any cash. Check history for empirical evidence.
How wealthy someone is, or how much income they have has no effect on anyone's ability to make money and accumulate wealth. Personal accountability and effort do. You want to take money from those that "do", and give it to those that "don't do", and pretend that will fix some societal problem that needs to be solved. It doesn't work, and never will. People earn high incomes because others freely choose to transact with them. Howard Schultz is a good example. So is Trump.
Top earners get to be top earners by doing something better than others and taking risks. All you do is look at an income differential retroactively and cry that a problem exists, but you never consider the prospective decision making that created the income.
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Marginal rates is a critical issue in a broad tax discussion, but not a single dollar in our economy should be taxed at 70 percent or anything close to it. It would be absurd if it kicked in at $1B. Not only is it an injustice, it's economically and fiscally foolish.
She and her husband are the people who "saved Waco" through their house fixer upper show. Instead of looking like Mogadishu like it did when I went to law school there (though I think Mogadishu had cleaner water), it now looks like Tripoli. It's still a dump but less of a dump than it was, and I think they've at least brought their water into the 20th century if not the 21st.
It won't raise what the far Left thinks (or claims to think and are virtually never challenged) like that second part time job at McDonald's won't raise enough to buy a new private jet. I've read numbers as low as about $20B per year and as high as $72B. The lower figure wouldn't even make a dent in the deficit, and the $72B would put little more than a dent. And of course, none of it would be anywhere near enough to bankroll the Left's policy agenda (single payer, Green New Deal, free college, etc.), which cost many, many hundreds of billions of dollars per year.
Should we raise the top rate? That's debatable, but keep in mind that in 2018, the US government took in more money than it ever has in it's history in terms of raw cash. It was a record year. Some will argue that as a percentage of GDP it is lower (at about 16.4 percent) than it was in some years. That's true. However, that is higher than it was in 1943 - when we had millions of troops deployed overseas and were sinking enormous sums into weapons development and procurement. And historically, it's not unreasonably low. Since WWII, we've generally been in the 15.5 and 18 percent range. To get the budget balanced, we'd have to get to more like what it was in 1944 (20.5 percent) when we were launching the D-Day invasion and developing the atomic bomb. If we were doing stuff like that, I'd be all for raising taxes, but we aren't. The point is that this is a spending problem first and foremost. I'd be much more open to a tax hike if there was a plan to rein in spending back to more like 17 or 18 percent like it was in the late '90s. (It's at about 21 percent now.)
Here's the ***** of it for the far Left. They like to point to other nations that have single payer healthcare, free college, carbon-free energy, etc., but they're disingenuous about it and not just in the normal way that politicians generally BS. They're disingenuous to a profound and extreme degree. They claim or certainly imply that they can do this by "taxing the rich." That's ********, and they should be called on that, but they almost never are. The countries that do what the far Left advocates don't do it by "taxing the rich." They do it by the taxing the middle class very hard.
For example, here in Germany, the rich pay higher taxes than in the US, but it's not a blowout. The blowout is on the middle class. Their income tax rates are somewhat higher, but even that isn't the big stuff. The big stuff is the 19 percent VAT, the almost $3 per gallon in gas taxes, the spectacularly high energy rates (about 2 - 3 times what Americans pay), and the 19.5 percent for the employee's portion of the payroll taxes, which employers have to match. (In the US, it's 7.65 percent for the employee.) That's how these countries pay for these big programs. Nobody is getting anything for free or even very cheap, and the rich aren't paying for the bulk of it.
Numbers like these should be thrown in AOC's and Bernie Sanders' faces every time they open their mouths. They should get relentlessly bludgeoned with the revenue figures and with the tax figures that other countries impose to bankroll the agenda items they advocate. But how often does that happen? Virtually never. They're just allowed to rattle on largely unchallenged and pretend that we can soak the rich into paying for single payer healthcare, free college, and green energy without it impacting the broader economy. It's nonsense, and it should be treated as nonsense.
Nailed it!
ProdigalHorn
10,000+ Posts
Which makes it amazing that this is the one graft and corruption scandal that the media will never touch. Harry Reid went into congress with an average sized law practice and came out a billionaire. No one cares. No one takes a look at any of it. It's not just Dems - it's how Washington has worked for a long time. It'll be really interesting to see where AOC is on the income scale in 20 years (assuming she's still in office then.)
Because reasons? Because they don't deserve to keep it? Because it's not right that they can keep as much as they're keeping of the money they made? Once you go down this road, your distinction of "how much" and "how effective" becomes meaningless. We'll take it because it's morally right to take it. If it has negative consequences, if they shift their tax structure and don't actually pay that money, if they do pay and it's not enough... none of that matters because the quality of the policy is irrelevant. It's the "morally right" thing to do.
That's how the left positions it up here. It's amazing to read: "The Feds are no longer providing a shield to our rich citizens so they don't have to pay our massive state taxes, and now people are complaining about our massive state taxes that they didn't have to pay before. The federal government is raising our taxes!!" It's one of the most bizarre lines of reasoning I've ever seen.
That's assuming that it won't cause changes in financial decisions that will lower income and shrink that projection appreciably. The reason that I have issues with this line of thinking is that whenever it gets pitched, it seems like it always turns out that the money isn't enough - either we don't bring in enough, or the projects cost more than we thought. It never stops at this point. The desire will always be to move the bar down.
The only hope that middle class earners have in this situation is if the new breed of dems (and yes, a lot of the GOP is falling into this as well, they're just conflicted enough to tap the breaks every once in a while and not in line with the unlimited money crowd that AOC listens to) are so convinced that deficit spending is OK that they'll just ignore all sanity, blow out the deficit, and rely strictly on a "rich people" tax that they won't start going after other brackets. Of course that will blow all of us up eventually, but hey, that's next year. Maybe global warming will have destroyed the planet by then and we won't have to care about any of it...
ProdigalHorn
10,000+ Posts
Not an expert, but one of the other issues with the health care costs in those countries is that essentially the US is subsidizing it. As I understand it, the drug manufacturers make up the shortfalls they suffer in other countries by charging more to the U.S., which is of course one reason why our health care can be more expensive. If that safety net goes away, it'll be really interesting (if by interesting I mean "not good") to see what happens to health care in general.
/end thread. The United States congress marginal propensity to consume is never ending. These idiots will tax and regulate us into Venezuela.Nailed it!
Seattle Husker
10,000+ Posts
One of the greatest problems facing our great Democracy is income inequality. It's income inequality that gives rise to the Sanders and AOC of politicians. Since we vastly lowered the top marginal tax rates in '80 income inequality has skyrocketed. I don't begrudge high income earners but also know that the greater the gap becomes the more convincing the far left arguments become. My goal is to preserve our Republic, avoiding a mutiny by the perpetual underclass that is growing. We will always have some social welfare programs. The dwindling middle class is putting further pressure on them.
We also have a spending problem that exists on the right and left. Entitlements must be curbed. All spending needs to be curbed. We generally all agree on this until we get to specific line items. Then the "buts" surface.
See my response to Mr. Deez.
Seattle Husker
10,000+ Posts
I 100% agree with hard work. Opportunity is a little less clear cut. Our banking, tax and bankruptcy laws greatly favor the investor class. Investment is not bad but tiliting the ecomomic scales in that direction has created a wealthy class that is nearly immune from slipping backwards.
I agree with this 100%. Military, social security, medicare, homeland security, the VA, forestry, parks, I don't give a rat's ***. It all needs to be cut, and really cut. Not fake "lower growth than what was once projected" cut.
SH
You posted, " One of the greatest problems facing our great Democracy is income inequality. "
Then you posted, "Entitlements must be curbed."
How would you redistribute income to make it more equal without some form of entitlement program?
IIRC median income is at the highest ever.
You posted, " One of the greatest problems facing our great Democracy is income inequality. "
Then you posted, "Entitlements must be curbed."
How would you redistribute income to make it more equal without some form of entitlement program?
IIRC median income is at the highest ever.
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ProdigalHorn
10,000+ Posts
Your mixing correlation with causation. Income equality skyrocketing has nothing to do with the tax rates - as Deez pointed out before, it wasn't as if all those billionaires were paying massive taxes and all of a sudden didn't have to anymore.
The world changed when the Internet happened. The wealth disparity has happened almost entirely because a vast amount of wealth became available, people jumped on it and they made massive amounts of money.
If anything, you could argue that those high marginal rates impeded innovation, and once they were removed, things picked up and all of a sudden people had an avenue to get rich.
Your intentions are good, but I think you're off at least to a point. To the extent that this problem is real, I don't think income inequality is the driver. Making billionaires poorer and therefore closing the income gap wouldn't help the matter. From an economic standpoint, I think the difficulty that people face when trying to get ahead is the problem. (I also think there are social and cultural problems, but that's another discussion.)
We don't teach marketable skills to people as a matter of course. We force them to go to college, and even then, we don't guide them very well. So they get out with tons of debt and sometimes not much more marketable skills than when they entered. Furthermore, our healthcare system is a mess for many though not all. We've created a private system but distorted it with a lot of government rules and money, creating the worst of both worlds. To people who aren't rich but are too rich for Medicaid and too young for Medicare, it's terrible. Fix those problems, and you'd do a lot for the anxious lower middle class, but it's very hard to fix them, because the people who benefit from the current system are very powerful (financially and politically) and very entrenched.
I don't think any of this gives credibility to AOC or Sanders. Taking money from high income earners doesn't create opportunity to the lower class. In fact, it diminishes it, if anything. It especially diminishes if we buy their snake oil and bankrupt our government by pretending that a 70 percent tax on high income earners will finance their policy agenda when it very clearly won't.
But when we're talking about fiscal health, we can't treat the spending problem as an afterthought. It's the core of the problem. It is a bipartisan problem, but not equally. The big GOP spending priority is the Pentagon. The Democrats' big spending priority is social spending - Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, etc. Our social spending is about triple what our defense spending is. It's the bigger piece. Both parties run up deficits, because both would rather deficit spend than force cuts to their own priorities or the opposition's.
There ya go, nothing you've ever said is more true than that.
Monahorns
10,000+ Posts
bystander, you comments just highlight that the biggest part of the problem is government spending not taxation. Tax receipts have been consistent post WW2 in the 15-19% of GDP range regardless of tax law and structure. There is only so much the government can or should extract out of the economy. But they have found a way to spend dollars on things for which they don't receive tax dollars for.
That has to be stopped. But literally nobody is talking about it. And those who mention it occasionally are dismissed as radicals or idiots.
That has to be stopped. But literally nobody is talking about it. And those who mention it occasionally are dismissed as radicals or idiots.
It's going to take a balanced budget amendment to do that. With the current structure, it's much easier to simply say Yes to everybody and leave everything to the next generation to handle.
Seattle Husker
10,000+ Posts
I'd take that money and put it towards the deficit, not give it away. I'm a social liberal, fiscal conservative. Around the 80's we decided deficit spending was acceptable. It's resulted in a $20T deficit. I know each party only cares about the deficit when they aren't in power but that's a problem.
Median income is simply a result a rising GDP from my perspective. If you look back over history the only time the median income drops is during recessions.
Seattle Husker
10,000+ Posts
The trend didn't start in 1995 but rather took a sharp right turn in 1980. The Internet and capital gains taxing simply accelerated the trend.
You could make that argument and there is some validity to it. That's a chicken and egg argument that I'm not sure we could ever acceptably resolve.
Seattle Husker
10,000+ Posts
I'm not advocating for "making billionaires poorer" or taking their money away and giving it away. Putting a governor in place to slow down the growing economic disparity growth is what I'd support. Some of the left might advocate taking existing money away whereas as I believe you should only put changes in place looking forward (e.g. increase marginal tax rates).
I'm a strong supporter of trade schools and an educational system closer to the European system of "tracks" for children of lesser academic prowess.
The health care system is definitely distorted but not sure I'd lay it at the feet of government rules except those written by lobbyists that further entrench Insurers, medical service and equipment providers and the Pharmaceutical industry.
In the end, the only thing the underclass understands is their current situation. Trump played on this a bit with his courting of the blue collar worker and promises of manufacturing jobs returning to middle-America. Regardless of whether you agree with Trump being the equivalent of the Pied Piper, the sentiment of the blue collar worker whether in Middle-America or inner city is real. They were the ones harmed the most in the last recession and again will be impacted the most in future recessions. In turn, its not just AOC and Sanders that are playing on the underclass but demagogues like Trump too. The style is the same but the policies are different. Trump simply convinced his base that immigrants, foreign trade deals and Coastal liberals are the root of all evils, not their relative education level in a knowledge worker economy.
Social Security may have started as a 'Democrat' idea but it's bi-partisan now. It's a sacred cow that nobody will touch as long as the Baby boomers are a significant voting bloc.
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