> We need to be pragmatic and get our people and economy through this crisis
OK, tax the rich. PS: It was the winning strategy before the crisis too.
OK, tax the rich. PS: It was the winning strategy before the crisis too.
But with salary instead of speed, I guess.
It reminds me of way back in 2000 when the NDP Party of Canada (left wing) said "we need to tax the rich way more" and a reporter finally asks "what do you mean by rich?" and the NDP leader inferred "a family of four making more than $60,000".[1]
That turned some heads, especially among the labor unions who typically vote NDP and typically make more than that.
[1]https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/income-over-60-000-qualifies-...
Namely what stood out,
> Among Americans with the highest incomes – a subset of upper income adults who are in the top 7% of the sample’s adjusted income distribution – about a third (34%) of those who say there’s too much economic inequality say the government should raise taxes on people like them to deal with this, while 64% say this should not be done.
This surprised me. So I'm curious, for those who are making in the top 7% and believe there is too much income inequality (over about ~$145,000/yr) -- and I do suspect there are a few of us here, you don't think that a plan to reduce income inequality involves taxation on that level of income?
I think most of these programs are characterized by extremely low administration costs as a percentage of budget.
Raising taxes on rich people changes the post-tax distribution to have less inequality, so it does literally bring into place a program to "fight income inequality." Given the fact that most government revenue goes towards social security, medicare, medicaid, you already know what it will be spent on and there already are effective programs.
It was a pedantic point - but taxing the rich intrinsically reduces the inequality of the post-tax income distribution because the difference between the top and the bottom is less.
> The low income might get better/more healthcare, but they don't get any more income from that spending
Lots of reasons - one is expenditures on healthcare by the employer, another is lost income due to injury/illness that preventative care could have prevented and that's before you start looking at medical expenses.
I agree, and I'm not saying that 10% increase to social security fundamentally changes the underlying division. I think more drastic action is needed. But I wouldn't fight against a haircut on incomes over $100k that expanded the lower limits on medicaid (which many poor millennials take advantage of), even if income inequality still existed at the end.
Are rich, left-leaning professionals really under the illusion that the sort of policy change needed to fight structural inequality will lead to no change in their own relative purchasing power because there are even richer baddies out there to tax?
1. Pew adjusts for COL in its income distribution, so no. 2. HCOL are HCOL because they are desirable. It's not just a higher cost of living for the exact same quality of life.
> they don't feel very "rich"
I think the point is that there is a psychological phenomenon where objectively very high-income people don't "feel" rich. Even after "housing, childcare expenses, etc," six figures is relatively affluent in my book. Also this was $145,000 for a single person, so I'm not sure childcare would factor in for most people.
I don't disagree with you at all. It's not reasonable to say "the middle class have a single family home in the mid-west, so if I don't have a single family home in SF, then I don't even have a middle class lifestyle".
And yes, a single person in a HCOL area making >$145,000 per year, is well off. It's just that well off in a HCOL area means owning living in a 2-bedroom apartment, rather than a 3,000 sq ft home.
The reality is that that professional/managerial bracket has a large proportion of both the wealth and income in America, just because there are so many compared to the extremely wealthy large-scale owner class.
> The reality is that that professional/managerial bracket has a large proportion of both the wealth and income in America
This is irrelevant. Tax policy should not be judged by what proportion of total wealth or income it collects, but by the economic incentives it creates and the externalities it offsets.
I agree, we just have different perspectives on which consequences are relevant, and on which timescales.
Optimizing for "size of resource collected" at time 0 affects the system and each agent's incentives within that system, usually leading to the kind of adversarial loophole-chasing/closing we see with income tax and tax havens.
Optimizing for economically sound incentives will lead to higher "impact" (by my definition, reduction of externalities, inefficiency, and inequality) in the long run for a dynamic system, imho.
Definitely not the definition that people with household income over 150% of the median seem to be using.