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The working poor don't have any money for the government to take. The middle and upper-middle classes have plenty of money for the government to take, but not e
by pc86 3y ago
The working poor don't have any money for the government to take. The middle and upper-middle classes have plenty of money for the government to take, but not enough to afford expensive accountants and business formations to shield their assets, or at least not enough assets to make that cheaper than just paying taxes. The wealthy have tons of money for the government to take, but can spend tens of thousands up to millions to shield it so they can't.
The natural progression of that is a cyclical squeezing of the middle classes via revenue extraction and of the working poor by cutting services.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> wealthy have tons of money for the government to take, but can spend tens of thousands up to millions to shield it so they can't I used to advocate for doubling all tax brackets. A friend ran the numbers: the result is volatility. The middle class has stable earnings in a way the wealthy do not. That doesn’t mean we can’t tax them more. But there is a trade off.
- pc86 3y agoOn an individual level maybe but the top two quintiles have made more money year after year regardless: https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/household-income-quintiles https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/household-income-... It's not like the top echelons of earners have a bad year and GDP plummets or anything; I'm not sure what "volatility" means in this context as far as tax revenues but I can't imagine it results in huge variability or uncertainty.