Why shouldn't crimes perpetrated by lower and middle class be persecuted? The rich already pay a disproportionately large amount of taxes and then society excuses lower and middle class persons from paying their small share of taxes.
How do people come up with these ideas?
Related to their income and overall wealth they pay disproportionate embarassingly little.
The "disrpoportionate" also includes well paid employees in the top 10%, but not the real 0.1% "owning" class. And above a few million worth, the actual money earned per year is usually obscured by all kinds of schemes, of which only the salary and capital gains tax ends up taxed (if that).
And that's without even considering the millions (pun intended) of ways they have to avoid being taxed but still have access to their money, from estates and "charity" foundations they control, to offshores, passing spending as expenses to their companies, special tax cuts, the ease of moving abroad for "tax reasons" at will (no biggie if you have the power to be accepted whether you go, the ability to pay the set amounts to acquire a foreign passport/nationality, to move with trivial for you costs, and so on), and of course access to teams of much better accountants...
It's legal. It's hardly fair. It means the working/middle class masses get to pay the burden of taxes (including sales taxes, and others) disproportionately to their income and wealth - and of course, the money taken from them is orders of magnitude more impactful on their everyday life than if we half of Bezos income (or even half his total wealth) was taxed away.
>and stealing from others is generally regarded as theft.
Only as long as you're not rich. If you're its normalized and has lots of legal avenues available to you to do that, same how unfairness is codified in laws like the above, in which "if you find a way to avoid income, you don't have any income to be taxed", which was made the case precisely because the rich have ample easy means to "avoid income".
1. Forces wealthy to liquidate assets. Impact: stock prices go down, real estate markets get excess supply floods, etc.
2. Forces income through taxable sales.
3. Theft
I fail to understand how taxing wealth is not stealing. Any time a wealthy person wants to utilize wealth to consume a product, someone somewhere is paying taxes on it. The closest that gets to not being true is when wealthy use their stock as collateral for loans and then get to take interest write offs, but the bank is still going to pay income tax on the interest income they receive.
Wealth means nothing until it is utilized, and all ways in which it's utilized are taxed.
In 2018 Trump's federal income tax was over 100x what mine was. But as a percentage of our respective incomes he paid 4.1% and I paid about 10%.
He's talking about the amount, you are talking about the percent of the taxpayer's income.
Of course, my first thought as to why that hasn't been possible is because there is a "lower bound" cost to such things that on a meta-level only really works if the rich do it. E.g. the $5k cost and $100k minimum bank balance to have a bank account in tax haven country X, and the $1600 yearly company registration fees to maintain a shell company in country Y.
INCOME taxes.
Which is NOT the same as WEALTH.
If you're going to talk about "the rich" then you need to differentiate between the wealthy ownership class (the people who own things like the debt for our 20 trillion dollar illegal wars, or your mortgage), and the software engineers and doctors who get spooked by any talk of raising taxes.
This guy explains the issue in simple terms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXP8gH0wddE - He's British, but it applies to the US also.
Here in the Netherlands that amounts to over 1% of total wealth.
It’s disproportionate by number of persons, but arguably proportionate by income.
[0] in 2020, US, top 1% paid 42% of income tax https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/3894233-how-america-actu...
That source demonstrates that it’s definitely not proportionate by income.
> the top 1 percent paid 42.3 percent of the total federal income tax in 2020 while receiving 22.2 percent of total adjusted gross income
We have a progressive taxation system on income (for good reason), which causes the high-income to pay far more than their proportional share of income.
Some will argue that they should be paying an even more disproportionate amount, which is fine and we can have that discussion, but it is an absolutely truthful claim that they are already paying a higher than proportionate share now.
https://www.heritage.org/taxes/commentary/1-chart-how-much-t...
Rich is measured by income in the US because the federal gov can only tax income. Wealth taxes are thankfully unconstitutional.
Billionaires' effective tax rate in France is 26%. _I_ pay more than that just in revenue tax, not to mention value added tax, etc. People making over 627000€ per month have a 46% effective tax rate.
The rich do not pay their fair share, and benefit disproportionately from the taxes that I pay. It's not my trucks destroying public infrastructure, or polluting the atmosphere.