GOP: "Why should we punish people for being successful?"
JO 753: "Because it's more profitable than punishing people for being poor."
Get over the notion of taxes as 'punishment'. It's a worthless, ill-considered perspective.
Until we all have pure spirits and IQs over 200, we need some form of government to make
and enforce the rules that allow us to live and work together. It takes money to do that.
The bigger the population, the more money it takes. The stupider and meaner we are,
(maximum and average) the more money it takes. The more power available to
individuals and groups, the more money it takes.
And its not like we can limit these considerations to America. The entire world is
interconnected, so what's going on everywhere needs to be monitored and sometimes
acted upon for the good of The Nation. It takes money to do that.
Then there are natural dizasters - the usual list of weather and geological events and the
unusual ones that could be much worse. The massive effort and resourses to deal with
these takes money on a scale that only the Government can handle.
Therefore TAXES.
But there's certainly room to quibble over how much and who pays.
Congress uses it's authority to levy taxes to influence all sorts of activities in every
aspect of society, all presumably to help the Nation. Unfortunately, it has often been to
the overall disadvantage of us ordinary citizens. The 70,000 page U.S. tax code is mostly
complex loopholes for rich individuals and large corporations. People with money want to
keep it and have found that contributions to political campaigns are a good investment.
A GREAT investment, in fact.
The top 1% now hold more wealth than the bottom 90%. The 'poorest' person on the
Forbes 400 list is worth 1 billion 700 million dollars! That's 21 times more than in 1982
and the gap between the top and bottom people on the list is getting wider faster.
The 4 richest people now have more money than the bottom 170 million citizens combined.
And as if the wealth gap wasn't spreading fast enuff already, last year the oligarchs told
their pet Republicans to 'pass tax reform or don't bother calling for the next election'.
They got a reform in which 83% of the savings go to them. We get a few crumbs at first, then
our breaks expire and we start paying more than before. Plus, that pesky national debt
Republicans are always harping on increases by 2 trillion! They will surely use this as an
excuse to start cutting back on all sorts of services.
The wealth gap proves that Uncle Sam is working for the rich, rather than us. Although the tax
system isn't the only way they are favored, it's a big factor. And they know it can be used
not just to level the playing field, but to tilt it against them and for the rest of us.
If you are thinking that it's wrong to make it rich vs poor, you are literally helping them
win the game by pretending there is no game being played.
Taxes bore me to stone. Look at the original post date for this page - nearly a year after I first
put a button up for it! Finally got around to buckling down and cobbling it together with alot of
help from internet forum friends who have specific and well thought out ideas based on real world
knowledge and experience. Its impossible for it to be perfect on day 1, so I expect to get many
suggestions for improvements. Don't be shy! Email, or better yet, post your ideas in one of the
forums I'm in. You can help yourself and help the country!
No more income tax for employees
The IRS will no longer care how much individual workers are making. Instead, with the
Employee Tax system, it will keep track of how much a company is paying it's employees.
You will never hear from the IRS as long as all your income is from an employer.
Instead of the microscopic increments found on the tax tables, there will be only five rates:
0% up to 10,000$, 5% from 10,000$ to 50,000$, 10% from 50,000$ to 150,000$,
30% from 150,000$ to 1,000,000$, and 50% for 1,000,000$ and up.
Companies will save a mountain of paperwork by grouping employees into 1 block to make a
single report and payment to the IRS. This will also save the IRS a bunch of work.
example 1:
Instead of being told you are getting paid 30$ per hour but only getting 27 after taxes, you will
be told that your pay is 27.30$. By the end of the year you earned 70,000$ so the company pays
Uncle Sam 4,000$. That's 2,000$ for your earnings between 10,000$ & 50,000$ (5%) and 2,000$
for your earnings between 50,000$ & 70,000$ (10%).
You are effectively getting a 30¢ per hour raise compared to what it would have been in the
income tax system at the same rate, but it's only about 2¢ more to the company. Instead of
seeing a big chunk chomped out of your paycheck every week, you were never thinking
30$ per hour so don't feel like you're being robbed.
Actually, you are getting much more than 30¢ per hour compared to the current income tax
system. Going by the tables linked to above, you would have payed 11,970$, making you
sorry for working all that overtime.
example 2:
You work at Walmart full time stocking shelves, earning 15$ per hour. You have a 2nd job managing
a bowling alley 3 nights a week for 500$. You also average 100$ per week selling Nooalf charts
on Ebay. Your total income for the year 2022 was 61,400$.
Walmart payed 1,060$ to the IRS for the hours you worked. The owner of the bowling alley payed
750$ for the 50 weekends and Wednesdays you worked. Both of them payed the 5% Employee Tax
based on what they payed you over 10,000$ for the year, not needing to know how much you earned
elsewhere. The 5,200$ you made on Ebay is self employment income (see below) under 50,000$ so
the IRS doesn't care about it.
The fact that 11,400$ of your income would have been in the 10% rate catagory if you'd earned
all your pay from 1 employer makes no difference. The IRS does not collect income taxes from
individual employees, it collects Employee Taxes in bulk lots from companies.
No more IRS boogyman casting a pall over the first 3 months of your year. No more confusing
forms to procrastinate about. No more torturous vizits to H&R Block. Nothing to mail in before the
deadline. April 15th will be just another day. Worries about income tax advantages or penalties
will no longer be skewing your decisions about major purchases. You won't be keeping records
and saving receipts all year trying to get a little more money back.
No tax for self employed citizens up to 50,000$
There will be only four rates: 0% up to 50,000$, 10% from 50,000$ to 150,000$,
30% from 150,000$ to 1,000,000$, 50% for 1,000,000$ and up.
It's a waste of time for everybody to keep track of all the measly crumbs earned and payed
by people mowing lawns, doing garage sales, fixing junk cars, etc. Not worth the IRS's time
to deal with millions of individual piles of paper to extract petty cash from people who
are already on the edge of poverty.
Same deal for employed people who suppliment their income from such activities. Honest citizens
shouldn't feel like criminals for selling their unwanted knick knacks on Ebay but don't have
the time to play accountant on top of their real jobs.
The obvious restriction on this is that it can't be used by companies to avoid paying the Employee
Tax by hiring people as independent contractors.
Unfortunately, self employed citizens earning over 50,000$ will still have to fill out tax forms.
There will be a gray area up to 60,000$ that they won't be penalized if the IRS finds that they
were in the taxable range but didn't file. Beyond that, or habitual failure to report will be fined.
All money payed by the government is tax free.
As per section 1 above, government employees may see their stated rate of pay decrease, but their
actual take home pay stays the same or increases slightly. The difference is that the government
will not be sending itself a percentage for each employee.
Whatever the income tax rate is for companies doing business with the government will simply be
subtracted from the original payment. For example, Chrysler sells the FBI 20 Challengers at
50,000$ each and their tax rate is 20%, so they will recieve a check for 800,000$
Lottery prizes will be the actual advertised amount. Same with pensions, social security,
disability, etc. In the future, the idea of Uncle Sam handing someone money and then nagging
them to give some of it back will be the basis for jokes about the current absurdity.
Manufacturers: 20%. Tangible service providers: 30%. Financial businesses: 50%
An important distinction between different types of businesses is how much it costs to generate
income. It's one of the biggest flaws in the Libertarian ideas about free market capitalism
and why we have so many problems stemming from insufficient money.
The biggest disparity, and thus the best example, is between financial businesses, such as banks,
and businesses that create tangible products.
Consider the mind boggling number of details in the business of manufacturing cars. The enormous
cost of special machines, thousands of vendors each with hundreds or thousands of employees,
billions of dollars in research, developement & design work, compliance with workplace safety
and environmental regulations, providing parts and service for decades for old models, billions
lost for recalls, product liability insurance for the inevitable lawsuits, gigantic payouts
when something really big goes wrong and people are injured and killed.
Banks just have to shuffle money around. Hell! The car companies have to do that too!
Kids do that for fun playing Monopoly!
Financial businesses include insurance companies, investment firms, banks, currency exchanges,
pay day loan shops, hedge funds, financial planners, banks - every type of company that uses
money to make money. They contribute nothing to the common wealth, so they are equivalent to
friction in a machine - it's unavoidable, but you do your best to minimize it.
The current system takes 6.2% out of your pay and your employer pays another 6.2%. The problem
is that it's capped at 128,400$, so those benefitting the most from our society are contributing
a progressively lower percentage. The new rate will be 5%, begin at 50,000$ and have no cap.
A ball park estimate puts the revenue of this at 1.5 trillion dollars, about 570 billion more
than the current system. (as reported by the clowns Trump put in charge of it, so who knows?)
Everybody will get the same Social Security payment when they reach retirement age or are
otherwise qualified. How much you contributed makes no difference. Individuals can choose to
forego receiving payment, but can change their mind for any reason at any time. Continuing
to work after retirement will not reduce your payment and it will be illegal for companies
to pay less than the usual rate of pay to people receiving social security.
example 1:
You are payed 100,000$ a year as the executive secretary/receptionist at a small Cincinnati
radio station. 2,500$ will be deducted from your pay for the year and the station will pay
another 2,500$. Your weekly paycheck will be 1,875$, showing 48$ has been subtracted.
example 2:
You were payed a total of 1 billion dollars last year in salary, bonuses and stocks as a hedge
fund manager at Brindly & Strackmoore Investments LLC. Your accountant writes a check for
47,500,000$ to the US Treasury, BSI LLC includes the same amount for your services in it's total
5% payment for all its employees, it's executives, it's own profits, and shareholder dividends.
example 3:
You retired from your position as a shoe lace renibber at the shoe store last year. There are
60 million citizens who are retired, on disablity or otherwise qualified to recieve Social
Security payments. Your monthly check is 2,050$, the same as everybody else's. That is the
total previous year's collected revenue divided by the total recipients rounded down to
the nearest 50$ to create and maintain a reserve.
As technology continues to eliminate jobs, this system can be gradually expanded into some
form of Basic income simply by increasing the percentage and adding qualifying circumstances.
This system eliminates inefficient revenue collection efforts and at least reduces the rate
at which the wealth gap is widening. Having the IRS and every adult in the country
spending their time almost literally sorting thru bread crumbs in the dirt while the REAL
money is flying way over their heads like swarms of gold plated jumbo jets is ludicrous.
Going by Sutton's Law ("because that's where the money is") will unburden the IRS
from about 90% of it's enforcement duties since 100 million working people won't be
motivated to cheat anymore. Going after Wall Street crooks and big corporations who find
ways to game the system no matter what the rules are is way more productive.
This tax plan will be seen as a calamity to those benefitting from the current arrangement.
They will offer intricately detailed explanerations on why it can't possibly work, why it
will crash the world's economy and send civilization back to the dark ages.
I don't know what they are teaching in business schools about the principals of capitalism,
but I do know what the results are. It cannot be denied that something is not working properly
when a major percentage of the world's population is utterly destitute, the majority in 1st world
nations spend most of their adult life in debt, and a tiny fraction at the top have more money
than they could reasonably spend for themselves in a million years, yet are still taking in more
at an obscene rate. Clearly there is something fundamentally wrong with the theories.
