"Don't hate the wealthy, hate the tax system."
What if I told you the wealthy specifically CRAFTED the tax system?
Books everyone should read:
Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich - and Cheat Everybody Else
Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill)
The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use "Plain English" to Rob You Blind
Yep.
The people that benefit from complicated taxes are always gonna be the ones that can pay for high prices accountants and plan all year to minimize their tax liability.
Everyone else would be way better off with a flat progressive rate system.
Eg:
0-20k: no taxes
20k-60k: 5%
60k-120k: 10%
Maybe a deduction for dependents.
Do the same for property tax, unrealized capital gains, and suddenly we've got a tax system that you really can't cheat. Because there's virtually no loopholes.
As a bonus, it's ridiculously easily to understand, and no one needs an accountant to figure it out.
Because once they have enough wealth that they can't pay a better accountant, they start lobbying to change the tax law and add something they already know how to exploit.
Shit doesn't have to be complicated. It's just harder for the wealthy to cheat if it's simple.
I agree, it should be simplified to the point of being unavoidable.
However, a very large part of the working force are employed only because companies need to make a financial statement to document their earnings. If we simplify taxes, you can kiss goodbye to 30-40% of all jobs. Many people work these bullshit jobs.
Treason doth never prosper, what's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason.
These clowns still not realizing that wealth and trickle economics are mutually exclusive. By definition wealth is the hoarding of resources beyond one's necessities. One does not get wealthy by releasing their wealth.
These people will not make more jobs. They will reduce the number of jobs, pay less and expect more, and hoard the extra wealth created by the hard work of their workers.
This past year tech companies have reported record profits while also seeing one of the highest layoff counts in years.
The trick is playing their game. While it’s not a lot, I have made a decent amount of spending money buying stock of companies that announce huge layoffs.
Almost always when this is announced their stocks go up. You just have to remember to sell it fairly quick because they always start producing less.
hate the tax system
The very system the billionaires and their corporations lobbied to create. So I can just hate the billionaires and kill 2 birds with 1 guillotine!
That concept of "Public Trust" is a tough one for Republicans and Democrats. The interests of the Public Trust as a concept are people's faith in government to "do the right thing", and is a foundational principle for democracy as a concept.
It's interesting this Pew Research data that shows a constant erosion of the public's trust in government overall, while it is noted that each party tends to trust the government more if "their guy" is in the Whitehouse, what's remarkable is the erosion of trust as a pattern that's now regardless of whoever's in office.
This thermocline inversion of trust overall is why the US is totally fucked. Nobody trusts their
democratically electedbought and paid for by special interests representatives to do the right thing for the public overall, but only for the special interests thatelectedselected them.I'd love to know what the perception of the public trust was back in the mid to late 1800's during the gilded age. I'd bet that it's similar to today's sentiment of corrupt fat cat politicians and gluttonous profiteering at the expense of workers and natural resources.
Source: Pew Research on the Public Trust in Government from 1958-2023
Thank you Koch brothers.
1 and 3 are correct. 2 and 4 are indeed clowny.
