steve wrote:If you have an income in the hundreds of thousands cut in half, you still have an income in the hundreds-of-thousands, and you will have no problem surviving. If you have an income that barely keeps your family alive, and you lose half of it, you and your family will die.
Right, but it seems like it would be a fairly straightforward and necessary exercise to determine where the "barely keeps you alive" line is and set a line well above there where your income cannot be reduced below it by taxes. We already have similar mechanisms in place today (earned income tax credit, etc.) to deal with the low end of the spectrum today. We currently lack mechanisms to deal with the high end of the spectrum or perhaps the high end of the spectrum simply has
too many mechanisms to avoid paying their share.
Clearly we cannot have an income tax system that causes people to suffer by taking from them the money they need to survive. But, I don't see the redistribution of wealth as a reasonable goal for an income tax system; its purpose is to fund the government. To the extent that the government decides to make it a goal to redistribute wealth, sure, I guess.
steve wrote:Rich people should pay their fair share -- a bigger share -- than poor people.
Perhaps we could address this problem of the rich not paying their fair share via other means than income tax. There is a class of people whose income is not really derived from wages but rather from investment interest or family wealth or other things that most people have in very small or nonexistent amounts. These people have no need to actually work to make money - their mere act of not dying nets them cash. These are the people I call "rich". Maybe there is a type of consumption-based tax or luxury tax that could be used to deal with this corner case. Estate taxes are another piece of the puzzle even though I have a hard time getting excited about the idea of taxing the same dollar twice (once when originally earned and once when inherited).
I can't get behind the idea that, for all people whose income is above the aforementioned poverty line and who derive their income from job wages, a "progressive" tax system is fair. It goes against the values I was raised with - hard work, education, frugality, etc. Taking away more of the income that I earned simply because I earned more than someone else seems like negative reinforcement for positive behavior. If I take a test in a class, I should get the same number of points for each correct anwser as all of the other students regardless of how many questions I answer correctly, right? Ah, whatever. Let's just pass a giant fucking federal sales tax on everything except food, health care, housing (including rent) and basic utilities and then we'll penalize everybody who spends money and presumably the rich will spend a whole bunch and the poor won't spend very much since they don't have much to spend. Might encourage people to save money, though that usually
hurts the economy...
Dan