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If you had the rule: "If you have money coming in, ten percent of it belongs to the government. No messing. No exceptions. No loopholes. Ten percent for everyon
by beobab 7y ago
If you had the rule: "If you have money coming in, ten percent of it belongs to the government. No messing. No exceptions. No loopholes. Ten percent for everyone for everything."
Would that increase or decrease the amount of taxes?
The fact that I can't even answer that simple question troubles me.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago> The fact that I can't even answer that simple question troubles me It shouldn't trouble you. Consider "if you have money coming in." What's "money coming in?" You could tax money transfers, but then my sending $10 from BofA to Citi would invoke a tax. Okay, so if the person on both accounts is the same no tax. Fine. What if some sends $10 from a sole account to a joint account? What if it's from a natural person to their single-member LLC? Et cetera, et cetera. Broadly speaking, federal income taxes take down about 10% of GDP and payroll taxes a further 6% [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_State...
- dragonwriter 7y ago> The fact that I can't even answer that simple question troubles me. Well, we don't (AFAIK) know the total amount of non-GDP transfers of wealth that occur. If you limit taxed transactions to just the transactions that show up in GDP, then it's equivalent to asking what the current tax-to-GDP ratio is, which is easy to look up (it's much higher than 10%.)