6 ms·

Actually the kernel of a good idea. Over a certain level of wealth taxpayers have a right to know why you're denying them millions of dollars of income, so your

Actually the kernel of a good idea. Over a certain level of wealth taxpayers have a right to know why you're denying them millions of dollars of income, so your tax returns are a legitimate public interest. Basically if you're paying close to the "full amount" of your tax rate in say the $5 million dollar range, then no disclosure required. If you're substantially under that your deductions should be public.

mattmaroon 2y ago
But you're just defining the "full amount" as what you think they should pay. If they're abiding by the tax code, they are paying what the law considers "the full amount". It would not be discriminatory to say "we're going to publicize the returns of anyone who commits tax fraud". It would be discriminator to publicize the returns of anyone the Marxist hive mind thinks should pay more taxes than they are legally required to. If the rich commit tax fraud, put them in jail. If they don't "pay their fair share of taxes" but don't commit any crime in so doing, be mad at the people who wrote the tax code.
- collingreen 2y ago
  Great! Let's get transparency and enough people in the irs to ensure everyone is following that tax code! That sounds like a great way to make sure a democratic government based on equal treatment of everyone is doing the right thing according, like you said, to the will of the represented people.
- dataflow 2y ago
  > But you're just defining the "full amount" as what you think they should pay. No, I think they're defining it as something like "the tax you would have paid if all your personal revenue that year had been ordinary income". The baseline is not an opinionated criterion, it's what most people deal with.
  - DennisP 2y ago
    So if you're a well-off retiree living on long-term investments and don't want your finances public, then, what, you have to donate extra money to the government? Because long-term gains are simply taxed at a lower rate. It's not some kind of special tax-avoidance scheme you can just refrain from doing.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - basilgohar 2y ago
      I think most people intuitively group people that have worked their whole lives and living off of their retirement savings and pensions and those that have inherited vast amounts of wealth and haven't worked the differently. Another group would be people that became very wealthy during life due to business, and yet structure their wealth in a way that avoids taxes because the relatively little they need to life their luxuriously life isn't represented as income either. We know these are different, it also seems quite unfair that their standard of living would be unaffected by higher taxes but poorer people are sometimes disastrously affected.
- petsfed 2y ago
  There are a million different ways to ascertain "income" to evaluate whether or not a person is paying their "fair share". That we doggedly refuse to do any of them if your income is not subject to payroll taxes is a big reason why people (rightly, I think) don't trust elites. To be honest, I have no special qualms with businesses doing their level best to minimize their tax obligations, provided they invest in their workers and/or R&D. Its just that they don't. The whole point of the old-timey ridiculously high highest marginal rate was to induce companies to do literally anything else than just pay their top executives more. Higher wages for the rank and file, investment in facilities, R&D, charitable giving, etc etc etc all have far greater impacts on society than the equivalent quantity shipped to the fed as taxes. If the ultra-rich want to avoid paying taxes by instead donating large sums of money to charities with broad socioeconomic impact, I have no problem with that either, for the same reason. The issue is not that the ultra-rich don't pay their "fair share" (whatever that means), its that the tide that raises their ships does not raise all ships equivalently, and the ways they avoid paying that "fair share" disproportionately benefits only them. I don't really benefit if Jeff Bezos donates a lot of money to Jeff Bezos' nonprofit to manage his art collection or whatever. I do benefit if he just paid an equivalent amount into the general tax fund (or donated it to the March of Dimes or something). I regularly pay out 20% of my annual income in the form of taxes. Its hard to be super sympathetic to e.g. Elon "I paid $11 billion in taxes last year!" Musk, when most years he pays far far less than that, and his net worth (as figured by his borrowing potential) grows proportionally a lot faster than mine does.
  - gottorf 2y ago
    > I do benefit if he just paid an equivalent amount into the general tax fund Questionable. Tax receipts that get spent on roads, bridges, other infrastructure that over time increase your and everyone's standard of living? Sure. Funding of boondoggles and sinecures for political allies? Not at all. > his net worth (as figured by his borrowing potential) grows proportionally a lot faster than mine does You were talking about income tax, so net worth shouldn't matter, right? And I think you're alluding to the fact that the ultra-wealthy can often temporarily avoid capital gains tax by borrowing against their stock holdings instead for their income; I don't think this matters that much in the end, because it's all taxed anyway. Interest paid to the lender is income to that lender which is taxed, and eventually the bill comes due, at which point shares will have to be sold and capital gains taxes incurred.
- nielsbot 2y ago
  > If the rich commit tax fraud, put them in jail. I feel this doesn't happen as often as it should. I don't even think the IRS is catching enough wealthy tax cheats. The GOP has traditionally cut funding to the IRS which lowers their audit rate and/or limits their audits to those to the less wealthy. (Since going after the really wealthy requires a lot more work.) I'll add every dollar of IRS funding nets many more dollars of taxes--if we ran the government like a business (for the sake of argument) we should invest a lot more into the IRS. It's free money.
  - mattmaroon 2y ago
    It doesn’t and advocating for that is sensible. Advocating for exposing private data because we don’t feel the amount they paid is fair, even when they’ve not been accused of crime, is not.
    - collingreen 2y ago
      The data suggestion was "if unregulated, unelected, unsupervised, and unvetted doge folks get and hoard all this data then we should at least make it public". I don't know if I agree with that but you're arguing against something else.
- alistairSH 2y ago
  Do I blame the wealthy for paying only what’s owed? No. Do I believe it’s unfair that the wealthy pay a lower effective tax rate than me simply because their income is passive and not wages/salary? Yes. Do I blame them for perpetuating this state of affairs to the detriment of the nation as a whole? Yes.
  - mattmaroon 2y ago
    Don’t blame them, there aren’t that many of them and we live in a democracy. If we’re dumb enough to keep electing politicians who don’t fix it, that’s on us
    - freejazz 2y ago
      Yeah, don't inquire further. What does it matter that these same people also own the news media? We live in a democracy. End of story.
      - mattmaroon 2y ago
        There’s never been more access to information. I can read news about American from Al Jazeera, The BBC, NPR, The Economist, or a wealth of other news stories not owned by rich Americans. If I vote against my own self-interest it’s my own fault for not knowing better, or because I think something else is more important.
        freejazz 2y ago
        That's just incredibly naive and not representative of the general American voting public.
- dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
  I don't know why you're putting the 'Marxist hive mind' in charge, maybe some academics across the political spectrum instead? I think maybe the point is to shame those using aggressive tax strategies. You can always exploit the law as written, if you put enough money behind the endeavor. It's impossible to write a law that is bullet proof.
  - mattmaroon 2y ago
    There’s a deep strain of inculcated Marxism on the political left and it is very prevalent here. They don’t even know they have it. If someone thinks that a tax payer who hasn’t even been accused of tax fraud should be punished, and that “the full amount” is one penny more than the tax code dictates, they’re certainly infected. Someone who wasn’t would instead simply advocate for changing the tax code.
- freejazz 2y ago
  Claiming a deduction does not actually mean you are entitled to that deduction.
dataflow 2y ago
My issue with this is that it still won't make people happy, because ultimately people care about wealth too. Like say some big CEO's income is $100M/year. And they pay half of it in taxes. Then after a decade they have half a billion dollars. Will people be content seeing that? Or still be unhappy at the obscene wealth?
- TylerE 2y ago
  The problem is that aren’t paying “half of it in taxes”, not even close.
  - dataflow 2y ago
    I think you missed my point. I was saying that even if they did, a lot of people would still be unhappy with that kind of outcome. Which isn't to say that they shouldn't pay more in income taxes. It's just to say that it's important to identify the real problem and address it directly, and to realize when you're not going to be happy with a solution beforehand.
    - TylerE 2y ago
      This is the worst kind of defeatism. By that logic literally no progress on anything is ever possible.
      - dataflow 2y ago
        What? The fact that I believe higher income taxes aren't going to make people happy makes me defeatist? All I'm staying is you have to lead with the fundamental problems are instead of your desired solution, and to realize when your proposed solution won't get you there. The whole point is to find better solutions, not to throw your hands and give up. At the end of the day, taxes are a means to an end, not an end.
        andriesm 2y ago
        Thank you this got me thinking. The issue isn't (just) whether the rich are paying a high enough rate, it is that a lot of people currently complaining still won't be happy even if we increase it by a lot. I can only speculate, but I wonder if the reason a lot of people shout "tax the rich" isn't that they want a bit more resources for geniunely deserving causes, but that they hate uber successful people and just want to see them "cut down to size". In this view, higher taxes aren't meant to bring in more revenue (Laffer curves place limits on the effectiveness of higher taxes), but to hurt Rich people. Bring them down so we don't see some people doing 100,000 times better than the average person. Maybe they think hurting Rich people will make the world a better place? Maybe they just wanna hurt them because they feel jealous? I'm super curious about what the true motives are. Why are people so unhappy to see the existence of centinares and billionares? I'm especially talking about people who made their money by creating new things, or made the world more efficient in some way.

mattmaroon 2y ago

But you're just defining the "full amount" as what you think they should pay. If they're abiding by the tax code, they are paying what the law considers "the full amount". It would not be discriminatory to say "we're going to publicize the returns of anyone who commits tax fraud". It would be discriminator to publicize the returns of anyone the Marxist hive mind thinks should pay more taxes than they are legally required to. If the rich commit tax fraud, put them in jail. If they don't "pay their fair share of taxes" but don't commit any crime in so doing, be mad at the people who wrote the tax code.

collingreen 2y ago
Great! Let's get transparency and enough people in the irs to ensure everyone is following that tax code! That sounds like a great way to make sure a democratic government based on equal treatment of everyone is doing the right thing according, like you said, to the will of the represented people.
dataflow 2y ago
> But you're just defining the "full amount" as what you think they should pay. No, I think they're defining it as something like "the tax you would have paid if all your personal revenue that year had been ordinary income". The baseline is not an opinionated criterion, it's what most people deal with.
- DennisP 2y ago
  So if you're a well-off retiree living on long-term investments and don't want your finances public, then, what, you have to donate extra money to the government? Because long-term gains are simply taxed at a lower rate. It's not some kind of special tax-avoidance scheme you can just refrain from doing.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - basilgohar 2y ago
    I think most people intuitively group people that have worked their whole lives and living off of their retirement savings and pensions and those that have inherited vast amounts of wealth and haven't worked the differently. Another group would be people that became very wealthy during life due to business, and yet structure their wealth in a way that avoids taxes because the relatively little they need to life their luxuriously life isn't represented as income either. We know these are different, it also seems quite unfair that their standard of living would be unaffected by higher taxes but poorer people are sometimes disastrously affected.
petsfed 2y ago
There are a million different ways to ascertain "income" to evaluate whether or not a person is paying their "fair share". That we doggedly refuse to do any of them if your income is not subject to payroll taxes is a big reason why people (rightly, I think) don't trust elites. To be honest, I have no special qualms with businesses doing their level best to minimize their tax obligations, provided they invest in their workers and/or R&D. Its just that they don't. The whole point of the old-timey ridiculously high highest marginal rate was to induce companies to do literally anything else than just pay their top executives more. Higher wages for the rank and file, investment in facilities, R&D, charitable giving, etc etc etc all have far greater impacts on society than the equivalent quantity shipped to the fed as taxes. If the ultra-rich want to avoid paying taxes by instead donating large sums of money to charities with broad socioeconomic impact, I have no problem with that either, for the same reason. The issue is not that the ultra-rich don't pay their "fair share" (whatever that means), its that the tide that raises their ships does not raise all ships equivalently, and the ways they avoid paying that "fair share" disproportionately benefits only them. I don't really benefit if Jeff Bezos donates a lot of money to Jeff Bezos' nonprofit to manage his art collection or whatever. I do benefit if he just paid an equivalent amount into the general tax fund (or donated it to the March of Dimes or something). I regularly pay out 20% of my annual income in the form of taxes. Its hard to be super sympathetic to e.g. Elon "I paid $11 billion in taxes last year!" Musk, when most years he pays far far less than that, and his net worth (as figured by his borrowing potential) grows proportionally a lot faster than mine does.
- gottorf 2y ago
  > I do benefit if he just paid an equivalent amount into the general tax fund Questionable. Tax receipts that get spent on roads, bridges, other infrastructure that over time increase your and everyone's standard of living? Sure. Funding of boondoggles and sinecures for political allies? Not at all. > his net worth (as figured by his borrowing potential) grows proportionally a lot faster than mine does You were talking about income tax, so net worth shouldn't matter, right? And I think you're alluding to the fact that the ultra-wealthy can often temporarily avoid capital gains tax by borrowing against their stock holdings instead for their income; I don't think this matters that much in the end, because it's all taxed anyway. Interest paid to the lender is income to that lender which is taxed, and eventually the bill comes due, at which point shares will have to be sold and capital gains taxes incurred.
nielsbot 2y ago
> If the rich commit tax fraud, put them in jail. I feel this doesn't happen as often as it should. I don't even think the IRS is catching enough wealthy tax cheats. The GOP has traditionally cut funding to the IRS which lowers their audit rate and/or limits their audits to those to the less wealthy. (Since going after the really wealthy requires a lot more work.) I'll add every dollar of IRS funding nets many more dollars of taxes--if we ran the government like a business (for the sake of argument) we should invest a lot more into the IRS. It's free money.
- mattmaroon 2y ago
  It doesn’t and advocating for that is sensible. Advocating for exposing private data because we don’t feel the amount they paid is fair, even when they’ve not been accused of crime, is not.
  - collingreen 2y ago
    The data suggestion was "if unregulated, unelected, unsupervised, and unvetted doge folks get and hoard all this data then we should at least make it public". I don't know if I agree with that but you're arguing against something else.
alistairSH 2y ago
Do I blame the wealthy for paying only what’s owed? No. Do I believe it’s unfair that the wealthy pay a lower effective tax rate than me simply because their income is passive and not wages/salary? Yes. Do I blame them for perpetuating this state of affairs to the detriment of the nation as a whole? Yes.
- mattmaroon 2y ago
  Don’t blame them, there aren’t that many of them and we live in a democracy. If we’re dumb enough to keep electing politicians who don’t fix it, that’s on us
  - freejazz 2y ago
    Yeah, don't inquire further. What does it matter that these same people also own the news media? We live in a democracy. End of story.
    - mattmaroon 2y ago
      There’s never been more access to information. I can read news about American from Al Jazeera, The BBC, NPR, The Economist, or a wealth of other news stories not owned by rich Americans. If I vote against my own self-interest it’s my own fault for not knowing better, or because I think something else is more important.
      - freejazz 2y ago
        That's just incredibly naive and not representative of the general American voting public.
dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
I don't know why you're putting the 'Marxist hive mind' in charge, maybe some academics across the political spectrum instead? I think maybe the point is to shame those using aggressive tax strategies. You can always exploit the law as written, if you put enough money behind the endeavor. It's impossible to write a law that is bullet proof.
- mattmaroon 2y ago
  There’s a deep strain of inculcated Marxism on the political left and it is very prevalent here. They don’t even know they have it. If someone thinks that a tax payer who hasn’t even been accused of tax fraud should be punished, and that “the full amount” is one penny more than the tax code dictates, they’re certainly infected. Someone who wasn’t would instead simply advocate for changing the tax code.
freejazz 2y ago
Claiming a deduction does not actually mean you are entitled to that deduction.

dataflow 2y ago

My issue with this is that it still won't make people happy, because ultimately people care about wealth too. Like say some big CEO's income is $100M/year. And they pay half of it in taxes. Then after a decade they have half a billion dollars. Will people be content seeing that? Or still be unhappy at the obscene wealth?

TylerE 2y ago
The problem is that aren’t paying “half of it in taxes”, not even close.
- dataflow 2y ago
  I think you missed my point. I was saying that even if they did, a lot of people would still be unhappy with that kind of outcome. Which isn't to say that they shouldn't pay more in income taxes. It's just to say that it's important to identify the real problem and address it directly, and to realize when you're not going to be happy with a solution beforehand.
  - TylerE 2y ago
    This is the worst kind of defeatism. By that logic literally no progress on anything is ever possible.
    - dataflow 2y ago
      What? The fact that I believe higher income taxes aren't going to make people happy makes me defeatist? All I'm staying is you have to lead with the fundamental problems are instead of your desired solution, and to realize when your proposed solution won't get you there. The whole point is to find better solutions, not to throw your hands and give up. At the end of the day, taxes are a means to an end, not an end.
      - andriesm 2y ago
        Thank you this got me thinking. The issue isn't (just) whether the rich are paying a high enough rate, it is that a lot of people currently complaining still won't be happy even if we increase it by a lot. I can only speculate, but I wonder if the reason a lot of people shout "tax the rich" isn't that they want a bit more resources for geniunely deserving causes, but that they hate uber successful people and just want to see them "cut down to size". In this view, higher taxes aren't meant to bring in more revenue (Laffer curves place limits on the effectiveness of higher taxes), but to hurt Rich people. Bring them down so we don't see some people doing 100,000 times better than the average person. Maybe they think hurting Rich people will make the world a better place? Maybe they just wanna hurt them because they feel jealous? I'm super curious about what the true motives are. Why are people so unhappy to see the existence of centinares and billionares? I'm especially talking about people who made their money by creating new things, or made the world more efficient in some way.