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Ok HN! We are intelligent, rational, and well intentioned- but we are also diverse! And it is great. Can someone please help me with the following! Why do we s

Ok HN! We are intelligent, rational, and well intentioned- but we are also diverse! And it is great. Can someone please help me with the following! Why do we still compare WEALTH with INCOME tax? Of COURSE wealth is skewed: you go negative pretty fast (college and mortgage), and then you accumulate over time. It is a pretty rational progress. Income can vary over time - and the tax should vary, too. Why do we smash these two together? Are we DELIBERATLY pushing for a wealth tax? We we doing it underhandedly? Is it ACTUALLY a good idea?

rexreed 5y ago
I also don't understand how wealth and income can be conflated like this. We have an income tax, so, no duh, we tax income, not wealth. Criticizing the income tax because it doesn't tax wealth is like criticizing sales tax because it doesn't tax property values. They aren't the same. I don't get how ProPublica can take such a stance. Either it's intentional, which is bad, or it's unintentional, which is even worse?
- ihumanable 5y ago
  80% of the actual article, https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov..., is discussing this exact thing. This isn't a case where there's a journalistic sleight-of-hand, trying to conflate and confuse wealth and income. one could argue that the entire thesis of the article is that because we tax income and not wealth, those with wealth avoid ever realizing income, relying on loans instead of income. It's an article about the end result of taxing income instead of wealth, there's literally a massive interactive scrolling graphic that discusses it half-way through.
  - rexreed 5y ago
    Well yeah that's obvious. I could summarize this whole article by saying that wealthy people don't pay much income tax because they don't report much taxable income. Since we don't tax wealth separately from income, they don't pay much tax. There, I summarized all their intense reporting in an obvious way. What does it tell us? Nothing that we don't already know. All they are arguing about is taxing wealth separately from taxing income. That will never happen for many reasons.

rexreed 5y ago

I also don't understand how wealth and income can be conflated like this. We have an income tax, so, no duh, we tax income, not wealth. Criticizing the income tax because it doesn't tax wealth is like criticizing sales tax because it doesn't tax property values. They aren't the same. I don't get how ProPublica can take such a stance. Either it's intentional, which is bad, or it's unintentional, which is even worse?

ihumanable 5y ago
80% of the actual article, https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov..., is discussing this exact thing. This isn't a case where there's a journalistic sleight-of-hand, trying to conflate and confuse wealth and income. one could argue that the entire thesis of the article is that because we tax income and not wealth, those with wealth avoid ever realizing income, relying on loans instead of income. It's an article about the end result of taxing income instead of wealth, there's literally a massive interactive scrolling graphic that discusses it half-way through.
- rexreed 5y ago
  Well yeah that's obvious. I could summarize this whole article by saying that wealthy people don't pay much income tax because they don't report much taxable income. Since we don't tax wealth separately from income, they don't pay much tax. There, I summarized all their intense reporting in an obvious way. What does it tell us? Nothing that we don't already know. All they are arguing about is taxing wealth separately from taxing income. That will never happen for many reasons.