You know, for such a dominant candidate, Hillary never really got the rematch she deserves- Hillary vs Bernie for the interim title, and then I think the winner should have to re-run against Trump.
General Has there ever been a bigger clownshow than this Trump presidency?
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Being taxed at a 70% doesn't mean the government takes 70% of your income. It means 70% of your income is taxable. Right now, anything over 34 (or maybe 36?) Percent of your income is taxed at the same rate. In the 1970s, up to 70% of your income was taxable if you were in the top 10%.Trump gave 25%, or $38 million of the $150 million he made in 2005, leaving him with $112 million for the year. Nice chunk of change for the goverment, and Trump gets more than his fair share to reinvest wherever he sees fit. If he were taxed at 70% per your suggestion, he'd have gone home with $45 million and Uncle Sam with $105. How is that fair? What incentive would a business even have to make such profits if they knew the goverment was going to take and waste the vast majority of it? Nixon collected all that money, but where did it go? Our debt has been growing exponentially since.
If you can make social policies work with a modest amount of taxation, I'm all for it. But the goal of our goverment should always be to operate at peak efficiency to prevent debt and keep the need for taxation low. Bernie shifting the higher tax brackets by 15% to help fund Medicare for All and subsidize state college education isn't quite as extreme as taxation at 70% and above.
Marginal tax rates and how they are applied are one of the great misunderstandings that the wealthy use to promote their interests.
I can't believe you had to explain that LOL
So fix the calculation then. What would Trump have owed if 70% of the $150 he made was taxable?
I'm not going to look up the tax tables from 1974 and do the math. It's all dependent on what the brackets look like, how much is divested into other assets, what amortization he's showing on properties etc. The tax code is complicated because the wealthy use a variety of instruments to hide and maneuver their wealth to avoid paying. When rich guys say "we need a simpler tax code," it's pretty much solely for their benefit. The majority of Americans can use a basic 1040 or 1040EZ but elaborate capital gains instruments and shell games gave us the tax code we have today which makes all of our lives more annoying.
For example, prior to the great tax cut of the early 80s Trump paid guess what?
Zero.
How would four simple tax brackets with the lowest paying zero dollars solely benefit the wealthy?
You guys are going to be in sooo much trouble when@Splinty gets back.
Because the top tax bracket disproportionately benefits the mega wealthy as a greater share of real wealth even within their own bracket.
Let's say you are in the top bracket at $250,000 household income. You and your wife went to college, together you own a small business operating a roofing company.
Now let's say I am the son of a billionaire who inherited a multinational oil conglomerate. My wife is a retired at 22 Vanity Fair model and I pay myself approximately $20 million per year to run the conglomerate.
You and I are getting taxed based on 25% of our income so now we both pay whatever the standard obligation for our bracket is, let's say $30,000 plus 25% on income over 200,000. For you, you're handing away $42,500 actual dollars under this scenario. I meanwhile am handing over $5,030,000.
At the end of the year, you have $207,500. At the end of the year I have $14,070,000. If I was able to show losses, depreciations or wrap things up in investment vehicles, it's possible I could have much more, all the way up to the full 20 million. You too could have found some loopholes but your accounting fees would likely have made getting to 0 liability prohibitive.
This is why the claim is made that the middle class bear a disproportionate share of the burden in aggregate as compared to the very wealthy. A saner progressive tax system like we had even under Kennedy, Johnson or Nixon would make things fairer and also allow for a functional federal government whose primary job is and has been assisting states more than administering programs.
Appreciate the explanation. Marginal tax rate is a new concept to me, so I just had a little crash course. Even in your scenario, 25% for the lower earners in the highest tax bracket isn't a bad deal. And the wealthy lad paid his fair share too. Why should we pay any higher, marginally or not, into an ineffective system that can't control its spending?
Well that's a separate question. The notion that the government can't control its spending is more complex than it seems and has more to do with historical decisions than what is happening right now today.
First, nation-states do not function like businesses where their budgets are as simple or tidy as balance sheets. Forecasting is very difficult in a government because of the outsized role of "acts of god" and political whims changing everything in a heartbeat. Because we're a democracy, political will is supposed to trump central planning so spending is largely the result of the decisions of the governed. Of course, some citizens and collections of citizens can hold more influence at different times, but by and large the "spending" we talk about is driven by regional desires.
Defense spending, for example, is widely misunderstood to simply mean increasing the military headcount and getting some weapons that can obliterate a person more efficiently than the already pretty efficient weapons we have today. But defense spending usually means contracting to firms in different pockets of the US who manufacture the parts that go in weapons, vehicles, materiel etc.
Most of these projects are already privatized, but they still need money funneling to the contractors. And most importantly, they need to be able to fail until they get it right. I was just working with a friend on his resume who built a number of parts for the Defense Department and NASA and his job was compliance and quality control. They needed enough cash to do the same thing over and over and over so that by the time those parts were on a bird that was in the air, it wasn't endangering the lives of our soldiers or their mission. If you applied strict free market controls to a system like this where you are looking for maximum success at the lowest cost you get products that are made by fewer people using cheaper materials with less rounds of testing because that's what capitalism does, pushes out a product.
The state has to have the luxury of failure because it has to arrive at the best solution for the broadest number of people as its prime directive. That failure does sometimes lead to abuse, but there are literally truckloads of regulations in place to prevent abuse. It doesn't mean it's impossible, but much more difficult than most people imagine. Getting it right is what's hard, not avoiding abuse.
So excessive spending and overspending mostly happen because of the odd cocktail of failure, politics and historical economic policy errors in forecasting that get pushed down the road. Decreasing the contributions of the wealthy is the old "starve the beast" rhetoric. In practice it has failed countless times and mostly led to unprecedented growth of our debt and spikes in societal inequality.
This is the kind of stuff I was referring to. The administration will eat Ls on the big promises he never was going to be able to follow through on anyway while they quietly gnaw away regulations few are paying attention to.
Trump signs bills reversing Obama regulations
Presidency, don't know.......
Overall shit show?
That whore getting away with murder, lying, cheating and breaking most every law and being an overall 2 faced cunt.........that's the biggest travesty.
Thank fuck we aren't under her rule
Overall shit show?
That whore getting away with murder, lying, cheating and breaking most every law and being an overall 2 faced cunt.........that's the biggest travesty.
Thank fuck we aren't under her rule
M
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U talkin bout me mum m8?
Sorry if this bleeds into real life m80
I meant Hillary, the only woman bill won't sleep with
M
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Who did she murdah
Give me a minute, I need to shut down a lot of porn videos so I can free up a window to search
Be back shortly
M
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Milf and hidden cam (yes, I believe it's legit)
M
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Hawt
It was the social issues that people has major issues with, not economic. He isn't doing anything any other Republican president wouldn't be doing.
Stop trolling.
You can't really be serious with your post though.
