Stop Coddling the Super-Rich

[mrstickball]

Mr Khan said:

mrstickball said:

Your numbers are off significantly. According to the Tax Foundation's research into 140 million tax returns, the tax rate among the super-rich top-1% was about 100% greater than those making $40,000/yr.

And according to your logic, the fact is that the people making $40,000/yr and spending everything they have on living expenses aren't going to grow the economy. They will pay into goods and services, but cannot invest in new opportunities. Therefore, it is the right thing to ensure that those that have more money aren't robbed of their monies so that they can invest into businesses and ventures that can create jobs - rather than be taxed. As much as you'd love to argue that a yacht creates few jobs, I shudder to think how many jobs are created by the government's taxation of the same amount of income. In most cases, the only jobs created from that have a horrible rate of return.

At the end of the day, there simply has to be a tradeoff of prosperity for services the free market otherwise wouldn't provide. It's not about taxing people to make jobs for stimulus purposes, it's about taxing people to support the people who need it

The only debate, obviously, is how to do this while minimizing the damage such taxation does.

The question is, 'what other services the free market wouldn't provide'. There is a great divergence in belief on what the free market wouldn't or couldn't provide. The vast majority of services could be provided for by the private sector at a fraction of the cost. To minimize the damage taxation does, one simply needs to reduce who gets taxed, and ensure that those that must be taxed, are taxed. A great example of this is the 'roaring 20's'. Did you know that only 2% of Americans - the top 2% paid any income taxes at all, while we retired 25% of the national debt?

My argument is that what the government does today - which requires about 35% of all GDP in the US - is far greater than what the government must actually provide. If it provided for what was absolutely needed, then we'd ensure that capital was readily available for more important, useful projects.