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I generally agree with you here, but as an aside there is one nuance you have to consider. And that's taxation vs disposable income. Imagine somebody earns $50k

I generally agree with you here, but as an aside there is one nuance you have to consider. And that's taxation vs disposable income. Imagine somebody earns $50k and spends $30k on their living expenses and pays a 30% tax rate. They have $20k left after their basic living expenses, but $15k of that is eaten up by taxes. Looking at their disposable income, they're paying a ridiculous tax rate of 75%. I think it's more reasonable to compare taxation on disposable income. In my opinion a fair tax would only tax disposable income anyhow. Of course that creates an incentive to have $0 disposable income but it's no different than the problem of corporations aiming to report $0 profit. Progressive tax schemes aim to achieve this, but in a completely broken and inconsistent fashion. For instance somebody earning $100k in San Francisco is going to be spending a rather different percent of their income on basic living expenses than somebody living in Bodunk earning the same, and so applying the same scheme to both does not make sense. It'd be much easier to just make everything that qualifies as a 'basic living expense' fully deductible, and then you pay e.g. 15% on the rest.

Bahamut 8y ago
There's more to it here - the wealthy generally are able to better play long games to further save more, better able to handle unexpected life events that could devastate the less prepared, and have better alignment with the government fighting/optimizing for their use cases. There are a lot more reasons as to the exponential advantages the wealthy generally enjoy suggest that the wealthy should indeed get taxed more, but it's probably better suited for discussion elsewhere than HN.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  Sure, but I think this starts getting into ideology. I think people should be taxed rates that, in a vacuum, can be considered fair. I pay 15% of what I can, you pay 15% of what you can is about as fair as you can get. The reason I'm not fond of going beyond this is because you start getting into very subjective territory. For instance while I agree with all you've said, excepting your conclusion, I'm sure you'd also agree that lower income individuals would also be much more likely to end up as the direct beneficiaries of where lots of government money goes to such medicaid/medicare and various social programs. Since these lower income individuals are going to be disproportionately more likely to utilize the benefits of these government programs, would it then not make more sense for them to shoulder a greater percent of the costs to account for this? I absolutely do not agree with this conclusion, but at the same time I also don't see any clear logical flaw in it. So you can do an ideological tug of war, one way or the other, to no end on these issues. One ideology might have the wealthy give nearly all of their income away to help the rest of the population. The other end of ideology might have people give none away and rely entirely on market dynamics. I think a fixed and fair sum is one of the more reasonable ways to step outside of ideology and try to create a system that nobody really loves, but also nobody can create rational arguments suggesting is, in and of itself, unreasonably biased towards one group or another.
  - conanbatt 8y ago
    > but at the same time I also don't see any clear logical flaw in it. Great example! And I agree. The example you give is one of the reasons I have with progressive taxation, by the definition of %. Someone with 1,000,000 income and someone with 30,000 paying the same rate, the richer pays a lot more than he will use from the state. So in effect, a flat-tax rate is most likely already progressive. I am in favor of a flat tax-rate for all, without deductions or exceptions. And I would go a step further and make the contributions public or pseudo-public.
    - FiveSquared 8y ago
      But what about the extremely poor?
      - conanbatt 8y ago
        Aid that comes equally from the rest out of the flat 15%. Its a different system one where the top 90% each cheap in to help the distressed 10%, another one where the top 10 give to the top 20, the top 20 to the top 30, etc.
conanbatt 8y ago
This is a convoluted interpretation of utilitarianism, which is the moral justification for progressive taxation in the general case. The last 10 bucks of a rich person are worth less to him than the last 10 bucks of a poor person in terms of diminishing returns. What I dislike enormously about utilitarian arguments is that, provided some evidence, you can justify anything. For example: why ever spend money on homeless people that will not work: its better to spend that money in literally anything else.

Bahamut 8y ago

There's more to it here - the wealthy generally are able to better play long games to further save more, better able to handle unexpected life events that could devastate the less prepared, and have better alignment with the government fighting/optimizing for their use cases. There are a lot more reasons as to the exponential advantages the wealthy generally enjoy suggest that the wealthy should indeed get taxed more, but it's probably better suited for discussion elsewhere than HN.

TangoTrotFox 8y ago
Sure, but I think this starts getting into ideology. I think people should be taxed rates that, in a vacuum, can be considered fair. I pay 15% of what I can, you pay 15% of what you can is about as fair as you can get. The reason I'm not fond of going beyond this is because you start getting into very subjective territory. For instance while I agree with all you've said, excepting your conclusion, I'm sure you'd also agree that lower income individuals would also be much more likely to end up as the direct beneficiaries of where lots of government money goes to such medicaid/medicare and various social programs. Since these lower income individuals are going to be disproportionately more likely to utilize the benefits of these government programs, would it then not make more sense for them to shoulder a greater percent of the costs to account for this? I absolutely do not agree with this conclusion, but at the same time I also don't see any clear logical flaw in it. So you can do an ideological tug of war, one way or the other, to no end on these issues. One ideology might have the wealthy give nearly all of their income away to help the rest of the population. The other end of ideology might have people give none away and rely entirely on market dynamics. I think a fixed and fair sum is one of the more reasonable ways to step outside of ideology and try to create a system that nobody really loves, but also nobody can create rational arguments suggesting is, in and of itself, unreasonably biased towards one group or another.
- conanbatt 8y ago
  > but at the same time I also don't see any clear logical flaw in it. Great example! And I agree. The example you give is one of the reasons I have with progressive taxation, by the definition of %. Someone with 1,000,000 income and someone with 30,000 paying the same rate, the richer pays a lot more than he will use from the state. So in effect, a flat-tax rate is most likely already progressive. I am in favor of a flat tax-rate for all, without deductions or exceptions. And I would go a step further and make the contributions public or pseudo-public.
  - FiveSquared 8y ago
    But what about the extremely poor?
    - conanbatt 8y ago
      Aid that comes equally from the rest out of the flat 15%. Its a different system one where the top 90% each cheap in to help the distressed 10%, another one where the top 10 give to the top 20, the top 20 to the top 30, etc.

conanbatt 8y ago

This is a convoluted interpretation of utilitarianism, which is the moral justification for progressive taxation in the general case. The last 10 bucks of a rich person are worth less to him than the last 10 bucks of a poor person in terms of diminishing returns. What I dislike enormously about utilitarian arguments is that, provided some evidence, you can justify anything. For example: why ever spend money on homeless people that will not work: its better to spend that money in literally anything else.