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Bad News If You Make $150,000 to $300,000: Higher Taxes for Many (wsj.com)
From a WSJ report: If President Donald Trump sticks to what he has said, Americans earning between $149,400 and $307,900 are most likely to see an increase in their taxes as a result of tax reform (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled). Those figures come from a recent study by the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan group in Washington, and are based on Mr. Trump's statements and proposals. The study concludes that nearly one-third of about 19 million households in that income range could see tax increases averaging from $3,000 to $4,000 a year. By contrast, less than 10% of households earning the least or the most -- below $25,000 or above $733,000 -- would owe more after a tax overhaul. Over all, the study found that about 20% of taxpayers would owe more after tax reform than before it. The issue of tax reform's winners and losers has resurfaced after top congressional Republicans and the Trump administration released a set of broad principles for tax policy on Thursday containing few details.
As a higher earner (well, when I'm not in startup mode), I don't actually have a problem with being taxed more - provided those that earn even more than me are not able to avoid the tax. The thing is, once you earn over about $100k, pretty much all your extra money is just going into bidding up the prices of a limited pool of assets such as housing. This doesn't benefit you or your fellow high earners, because if we can't build more, say, London housing when a rickety Victorian hovel costs over $1 million, then bidding up the prices to even more ridiculous levels isn't going to deal with the fundamental supply issue. All that happens is a parasite class forms around these things, consisting of speculators, gamblers and real estate agents. The same houses are still being traded between the same pool of high earners.
If we had higher taxes, then it would help to curb speculation activity by preventing this form of asset inflation, and governments could use the money to redirect economic resources towards, say, actually creating new housing supply through transport infrastructure or training new engineers and doctors. Of course there is a big if there, because the government could also just use those resources to create more bureaucracy, but that is probably still better than real estate agents.
The big problem, though, is that once you move into the 0.1% nobody is paying any taxes. I mean, the wealthy are even quite open about this - its not some sort of conspiracy. The problem then is that if you just tax the upper middle income earners more, all you do is allow the ultra rich to hoover up all the assets off them even faster than they are doing now. It is a one way road towards neo-feudalism.
There is no easy solution. Probably a land tax would help, but that is almost impossible to achieve politically. France tried a wealth tax, and London is now stuffed full of rich French people. An aggressive death tax is probably the best solution, but again this is incredibly hard to achieve politically. Of course the natural solution is a revolution where the masses just confiscate everything. I really hope we can avoid this.
The rich don't have income, they have capital gains. The rich also never learn. This will end badly. Very badly.
Sweden's Government, by and large, governs appropriately and efficiently. The United States Government is self serving and power grubbing. Besides, they get more than enough money - our Defense Budget alone is more than the next 3 countries combined; meanwhile we have people literally starving in the streets, bridges collapsing due to an inability to maintain them properly, and nearly every one of our politicians is in the pocket of big business.
Never having lived in Sweden I don't know if that's comparable or not, but I suspect not.
It's actually going to be more painful for those expensive areas like SF.
One of the proposals in Trump's tax plan is to drop the deductions for state and local taxes, and for mortgage interest. The areas where people earn $150-300k are usually the areas with high state and local taxes, and where houses cost a lot.
Maybe, but that's a result of lifestyle choices.
Not always where health expenses come into play. The out of pocket expenses can be staggering. Even more so if congress again will allow lifetime maximums.
Not to mention those who care for family members that don't have adequate insurance or pensions, like parents or grandparents. The family typically end up with the bills, and grin and bear it.
America has such a love of sociopathy that psychologists have had to adjust the score downward in America vs. Europe
Sweden's government openly promotes degeneracy, so I don't know why anyone is sucking their dicks. Sweden's government is disgusting.
You don't get the politicians that "you vote for". You get that, influenced by corruptors. Corruptors are drawn by power, like water flowing downhill. A powerless country with weak corruption safeguards may well never have corrupt men in power, because the "reward" to a corruptor may not be worth the costs. A strong and influential nation, especially with a lot of centralized power, needs huge anti-corruption to be anything but a kleptocracy.
Because Detroit, Chicago, and Baltimore are all Republican strongholds...
The worst shitholes in America are all majority Democrat voters and leaders.
Sure man, you believe that, you can blather on about those cities, but then we remember states like Kentucky, Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, Missouri, Florida, all have crippling problems with poverty too.
Of course, the real reason you hate those cities is that they're so brown. But then, that's why you hate a lot of things, like Soul Train and Deep Space 9.
Our political parties are not a good representation of our populace. Years of gerrymandering, corporate lobbying, and manipulation of the polls with things like voter ID laws have led us to our current political landscape. Less than maybe 35% of population really supports the kind of extreme conservatism that the majority of the republican party leaders espouse, but the republicans still hold majority in both halves of our legislature; as well as our presidency.
So I disagree that our gov is a mirror of our society. The gov is a perverted and twisted result of years of allowing certain government systems to proceed unchecked certainly. But I don't think our congress really mirror our populace.
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