Quote:
Originally Posted by goofball
I get that this post made sense when you wrote it, but arguiing that someone making between the 99th and 99.5th percentile of income is struggling and can't afford additional taxes is.. a stretch.
Also your 50% effective tax rate assumption is based on fiction, there's no one close to that in the US. All in federal tax rates top out at around 30%, and that's for the top 1% of earners.
If you have budgeted expenses based on a certain level of income and that income falls short you will have to make cuts. It doesn't matter if you make $6.50/hr or are $100mm/year. These cuts in spending can have far reaching effects and could even trigger another financial crisis if the tax increases result in people falling short on mortgages or becoming insolvent due to an inability to cut discretionary spending fast enough.
While 250k might seem like a lot (and it is based on a global or historical context) you still need to make more than that to afford a house, utilities, transportation, childcare, food, clothes, sports/extracurriculars, internet, cellphones, and retirement savings in many major cities. Sure, you don't really need new clothes for your kids every year bc you can buy them at goodwill and sure a cellphone isn't essential to staying alive, but they are pretty reasonable requests as are good childcare programs and having the ability to enroll your kids in extracurriculars.
If you start taxing the hell out of people before they can even afford these things you're going to get people like me who think it is too much.
I get that things like having kids or living in a city are choices and not a right, but they should be choices that people feel like they can make and still afford.
Furthermore, you must be pretty bad at reading because I wasn't talking about federal taxes, I was talking about total taxes. I know for a fact that I paid over 30% in taxes last year so lol at saying that's the top.