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I make 750k a year, give or take. I think I paid 150k in taxes, more or less, last year. I would gladly pay 600k a year in taxes if it meant healthcare, educat
by hungie 2y ago
I make 750k a year, give or take. I think I paid 150k in taxes, more or less, last year.
I would gladly pay 600k a year in taxes if it meant healthcare, education, housing, and food were secured for all.
Let me keep 20% of my work for luxuries I like, but the fact that I'm only paying like 20% is fucking criminal while people are starving in this country.
I recognize I'm differently wired and have different values than most, but like, there has to be a line between 20% and 80% tax rate that we can live with.
- antimora 2y agoWhich means you are not willing to pay taxes because your preconditions are almost impossible to achieve judging how the government operates.
- hungie 2y agoI recognize no system is perfect. If there was an attempt to achieve those things, crank my taxes up. I don't need perfect to be the enemy of good.
- stouset 2y agoI’m generally with you, though I live in CA so my effective tax rate is around 50%. I am very troubled when people who proclaim to be liberal move here—an area with high potential—to “strike it rich”, do so, and then immediately fuck off to another state where they can sell their vested shares without paying CA tax rates. CA does try to claw back avoided taxes from the worst offenders of this, but mostly they only go after people who move out on paper but still lead lives here. One of the biggest problems though is that bumping marginal rates doesn’t affect the ultra-rich, who use tax-avoidance schemes like loans against invested assets to live off extreme wealth with nearly zero taxable income.
- andreilys 2y agoProbably because CA politicians want to spend tax money on things like providing $150k of housing loans to undocumented migrants Losing out on a house bid as an American citizen to an undocumented migrant thanks to this policy, truly the type of stuff only a CA politician could come up with. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/california-democrats-propose-state-bill-to-help-illegal-immigrants-secure-first-home-loans/ar-AA1ptQXZ?ocid=sf https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/california-democrats...
- hungie 2y agoHumans deserve housing. My undocumented neighbors are still my neighbors. We shouldn't have to decide between which of two humans gets housing. House all my neighbors.
- pb7 2y agoHouse them yourself, you make $750K a year.
- hungie 2y agoI do. I provide housing units at the cost of maintenance. I believe profiting from rent is deeply unethical. My renters have paid basically for their share of heating, electricity, water, sewer, and wear and tear on the building itself. But I cannot house the thousands of unhoused people in my city alone. I can provide housing for 2-5 of them at any given time. That said, do you know what offering housing for a couple hundred bucks a month does for a struggling family? It fundamentally changes their ability to establish themselves. Build savings, escape poverty. Edit: I'm not trying to signal or whatever by posting this. I have ethical beliefs about supporting one's local community and try not to be hypocritical about it. When people challenge me, suggesting I might be hypocritical ("why don't you spend your own money on it!") I try to respond with, "I do. And I see the changes it makes in real human lives." But always as a response to someone trying to call me out, never unprompted.
- pb7 2y agoNo, pay for all of it, not what it costs you to maintain while your properties balloon in value far more than any rent you could have collected on them. You are no more ethical than any other landlord so please stop pretending to be. You and real estate investors like you are contributors to the homelessness problem.
- hungie 2y agoI put the land I buy into a trust that removes my ability to profit from it. The trust cannot take actions that would cause them to profit from selling the land. Any equity the trust holds is from me or others putting in funds that are held solely for the purposes of providing housing for the community at cost. My personal mortgage I do pay for, and I will be ceding whatever land I hold to that trust upon my death so that it can provide housing in perpetuity. The only reason the land is not currently in the trust's hands is because I need the ability to move freely. I could arrange to sell the house to the trust, and lease it from the trust, but because there's a bank involved with my mortgage that gets more complex. I assure you, I am not profiting from housing.
- energy123 2y agoThe peak of the Laffer Curve is thought to be around 70%, so anything above that is bad.
- hungie 2y agoOk, if you said let's compromise at 70% I suppose I wouldn't fight you!
- coding123 2y agoIf everyone that wealthy was left with 150k, there would be no businesses, and no jobs. We'd go from a mostly employed country to a mostly unemployed country and the governing class would become the 1% overnight and the previous 1% would be part of the 99% instantly.
- hungie 2y agoThat's a heck of an assertion! Can you walk me through it?
- coding123 2y agoIt's communism. You should keep your 600k. No government is going to spend it better than you. They're going to erase it, it will go directly to military generals and their projects.
- hungie 2y agoThere's lots and lots and lots of kinds of communism. It's actually more socialism (which there are also lots of types of) than communism to advocate for raising taxes like this.
- consteval 2y agoIt's not communism, nobody actually knows what communism is. Working in the private sector, earning a salary, and then giving some of your salary to the government in exchange for some services is not communism. Communism is more radical than that, meaning cut out the middle man - no private sector at all. The government, or more accurately the people, own the economy collectively. Or that's the idea, implementation varies especially when you sprinkle in dictatorship.
- andreilys 2y agoEveryone would be employed by a Uniparty government. A fantastic system, just ask the Soviet Union.
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- exabrial 2y agoThen give away the $600k!
- ashconnor 2y agoOP said: >I would gladly pay 600k a year in taxes if it meant healthcare, education, housing, and food were secured for all. Don't be obtuse by saying "give it away".
- hungie 2y agoCharity is not the same as taxes. It's also not mutually exclusive. I can and do give away huge sums until those taxes go up. I'm buying land and putting it into conservation, giving to community land trusts, and other ways that essentially make permanent changes towards the world I want to live in.
- alberth 2y agoIs all of that $750k wages? If some of it is assets (stock), I firmly believe that should be taxed differently than earned cash wages.
- hungie 2y agoIt's a mix. I sell my stock immediately and rebalance it to other things.
- stouset 2y agoIt should be taxed differently, but the core problem is that the ultra-wealthy never realize gains. They borrow against the value and then their inheritors pay off those debts with the assets which have now had a reset tax basis. The sanest solution is to simply preserve cost bases for inherited assets.
- doctorpangloss 2y ago> it meant healthcare, education, ... Well you pay for this stuff, your money goes to semi-private institutions like universities (healthcare, education) instead of bouncing through taxes first. This is non-tax compulsory payments (NTCP), no? > housing, ... Real estate is California's #1 industry, biggest sector in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and according to everyone, community regulations and tax-adjacent policies like Prop 13 are the biggest influence on housing prices. So you kind of do pay taxes, you are obligated by law to play by the housing rules there. > food, ... Government subsidies are the #1 source of profits for agribusinesses. Similar to saying Tesla's main source of profit was carbon credits. Kind of a junk analysis by one interpretation, kind of central to the business by another. Anyway my point is the average person, according to some people, pays closer to 40% like many Europeans do, when you include orthodox defined NTCP. If you think deeply about how much you are forced to pay for by law or similar mechanisms, maybe it's higher. You live in the world you want right now. NTCPs go to regular people too. University health systems are many states #1 employers. They are socialized in a way that matters. Maybe it isn't funded through taxes but do you see how that's kind of a moot point?
- hungie 2y agoI think housing should not be a commodity. Medicine and education shouldn't be run for profit. (Ideally, commodity food would be grown for the common good, too.) But also, I'm posting here in recognition that my politics aren't exactly common here. And that's ok!
- doctorpangloss 2y agoI’m affirming that your politics are really mainstream, they are the status quo. It just doesn’t sound that way because of accounting.
- consteval 2y agoI wouldn't say so, what's he's speaking about is nationalizing many industries. Healthcare, food industry, housing. I mean, this is socialism. Not communism, but socialism. Granted our media knows fuck-all about politics, but we have close to zero socialist politicians in the US. Nationalizing industries is wildly, wildly unpopular - practically unheard of. Every industry listed does, actually, turn a profit in our current system. They are, truly, private - although regulated.
- andreilys 2y ago"healthcare, education, housing, and food were secured for all." Ah yes all of this provided to you by Big Government, who can at a whim withdraw these services if you are found to engage in WrongThink. We already have seen Western governments like Canada financially banning grandmothers who donated to a trucker protest or the UK imprisoning people for tweets. Do you really want a bunch of DC politicians to have the power of life and death, not to mention access to swaths of capital that they will inevitably use to engorge and enrich themselves? Your 600k in taxes will go into the pockets of various interest groups that markup their goods and services because they know Uncle Sam will foot the bill.
- hungie 2y agoI would ultimately prefer a system of small, local, community managed democratic syndicalism. But, if I have to live in a capitalist world I'd prefer to live in one where the people in power at least try to take care of people. Ideally, no, it would be centralized in neither the wealthy nor the government. But I think "raise taxes" is an easier path to net good than "let's seize the factories and run federations of democratically run industries in the interest of the wellbeing of all".
- laverya 2y agoI think you're missing that the suggested path is not "let's seize the factories", but instead a return to "distributed charity" like we had before the Great Depression.
- thrill 2y agoYou're quite free to voluntarily send all your money to the Treasury.
- hungie 2y agoCharity serves a different purpose. And, please read the thread to discover that I am, in fact, putting my money where my mouth is.
- thesuavefactor 2y ago> You're quite free to voluntarily send all your money to the Treasury. Taxes should be fair for everyone of course. The original question was whether billionaires should pay more, and they should. The amount of money they have allows them to dodge the amount of taxes they truly owe. This gives them an unfair advantage over the rest of us, which only increases over time.
- ruicraveiro 2y agoI don't think people like you should pay more taxes. The problem is at the much, much higher levels. The concentration of wealth like Musk, Bezos, and others have, should simply not exist. Here's the criteria: Your wealth level isn't enough for you to have an oversized power over society. People like Musk have and they are not elected by the people. This threatens democracy itself.
- RhysU 2y ago> People like Musk ... are not elected by the people. Untrue. Everyone who bought a Tesla voted, with their dollars, to give Musk this wealth. Everyone who owns Tesla stock voted, with their dollars, to give Tesla this wealth. And everyone who voted, with their votes, for representatives that gave EV tax breaks voted to give Musk this wealth. The man is rich because of economic and political cause and effect. Don't pretend the world that made Musk eye-bleedingly wealthy is somehow disconnected from the world of our collective actions.
- mhx1138 2y agoIf anything, it’s an intransparent trade that gives Musk and the others their power. It is not a vote.
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- ruicraveiro 2y agoThe issue isn't their economic power by itself. It is their outsized political power that derives from that economic power. The more political power the oligarcs have, the less power all the other citizens have.
- RhysU 2y agoPut your excess money where your mouth is and leave coercive government out of it. You, personally, you can provide these things for people in need. For example, I am in a similar financial situation. My family took in a Ukrainian refugee. We house, feed, clothe, and educate this refugee to provide one individual with exactly the things you bemoan others not having. In your and my income bracket, it takes only caring enough and the true will to do something tangible for others. For $300K of otherwise unused income you could support 4 people. So go support 4 people. And keep your hands and your politicians' hands off my finances.
- timbit42 2y agoHe can't do it as efficiently as an organization can as it can see the bigger picture of what is needed where. He also probably doesn't want to spend hours of his life figuring out which people to give it to. Why duplicate effort?
- RhysU 2y agoIf he doesn't want to spend his life doing this then it isn't a priority for him. In these income brackets, time is the only true coin. If he doesn't spend his time then he doesn't value the outcome. Pretending that amassing wealth to produce good societal outcomes is efficient is how we get shit like FTX. Just jump in.
- hungie 2y agoPlease read the thread. I'm offering housing, securing forestland for conservation, and setting up or working with trusts to ensure those things continue in perpetuity. I'm also passionate about growing food and giving it away. Don't say, this person doesn't care/doesn't actually believe until you have evidence of that.
- simonsarris 2y agoHe can probably do it significantly more efficiently than an organization can. Governments and non-profits are not known for their efficiency, only their scale. Many non-profits are famously, scandalously inefficient.