GOP's not-so-secret weakness: unfairness

boing
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Not to mention the generous tax breaks that such businesses get from city/town councils as an enticement to open a store there.

I recall a study showing the net negative impact on municipal coffers when comparing mixed use retail vs. opening a new Walmart store. Typically the argument is that sales tax revenue generated from a big-box retailer will more than offset the tax breaks the company gets for opening the store. Turns out this is not always true…

Acting on a hunch, PIP crunched the numbers and found that, astonishingly, the downtown buildings yield was $250,000 per acre in county property tax. This differed with the county’s WalMart, which yielded just $8,000an acre in comparison.

http://makingchangeatwalmart.org/taxes-and-subsidies/

A study conducted in Asheville, NC found that a downtown mixed-use development would generate $83,600 per acre per year in retail taxes, vs. $47,500 for a Walmart. Similarly, the mixed-use development would generate $634,000/acre per year in total property taxes vs. $6,500 for a Walmart.[9] Another study by the organization Smart Growth also concluded that mix-used developments are generally more productive tax-generating spaces.[10]

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And though there’s no absolute, we’re all essentially arguing on what the character of that is, and how best to get as close to it as we can. For all our evils, as humans we are generally fascinated with, and very much desire a just world.

One thing I’d like to point out that seems to underpin your arguments about fairness is that your arguments take as given that rewards for work done are distributed “fairly” (justly, equitably, accurately, sensibly) by a market to it’s participants. This is a huge and fundamental assumption, though it’s easy to overlook. When you talk about progressive taxation “taking” things away from those who are wealthier, there is an air of god-givenness (or at least “natural” or irrefutable) to the income and winnings that that person had in their possession “prior” to redistribution through taxation. Now it is a messy business, no one but the most simplistic will deny, to begin to talk about mediating the way the markets distribute rewards for contributions made. Prior efforts have run afoul of authoritarianism and greed, but just like with capitalism, individual instances (slavery, wage-slavery, collusion) can’t be used as a perfect proxy for the idea in the abstract.

Markets are manipulated, markets are dominated, markets are used and abused. They are not something outside of us, without the tug of motives of individual players, any more than the government is, so both must be mediated. Socialism is an idea predicated on the fact that markets alone cannot decide the the total balance of rewards that each person should receive for their contributions. Does a sanitation worker or teacher really contribute 1/10,000 to [insert purpose of human life on earth here] than a stockbroker? The market says yes. Socialism says no.

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Its important to understand that currently the conversation is about changing things, the people you disagree with would like things to be different, and what you advocate for, a system that intends to incentive investment in new ventures in the hopes of promoting growth that would benefit all, is roughly the system in place now.
If that’s not your position, I apologize, that’s the understanding I have of it after reading through your posts, anyway, I hinge nothing on it.
(And lets, hopefully, agree that we can’t expect to get the “perfect” system no matter what.)

If rich people are taxed less in order to entice them into investing and hopefully creating wealth for all, then the question to ask is, why isn’t it working?
I’ll leave it to you to personally ponder why you should support this system if it isn’t fulfilling its intended purpose, I don’t require an answer.

The biggest flaw I find in the current system is twofold, I may be wrong about the first one, but I’m pretty solid ground when it comes to the second:

  1. Its a key feature that allowed for a small section of the population
    to amass most of the wealth.
  2. If wealth is concentrated on very few people, then its these people who are now overly burdened with the task of investing and growing the economy for the benefit of all.

I don’t mean that these people are overly burdened in an economic sense since they know they’re being allowed to profit without being taxed as much because the service they would perform is valuable to the society as a whole. They are burdened in a moral sense because they are not obligated to invest back into the society that grants them the privilege to “not pay their way” so they invest back into the same society.

So what happens when “the carrot” isn’t working?

It seems only proper to me to call this an abuse of the system and therefore unfair. So any call to fairness has to be taken as a call for rich people to pay their way, either in taxes or investment.

Saying its not fair any other way is to ignore that there’s a reason that the rich are not taxed more, and you said it, its to promote wealth redistribution, not because its fair, and certainly not because its unfair otherwise, the reason is so they have more money to invest. It wouldn’t make sense for you or anybody else to say that if rich people get taxed more then they couldn’t invest as much AND that it would also be unfair, one’s a threat and the other is an appeal to morality.

The biggest problem with any of this though is that people who are for the status quo keep quoting theory: “If you tax rich people less, that means they’ll have more money to spend on creating jobs”, while the people calling for fairness are quoting what they are seeing is actually happening and saying: “That’s not what they’re doing”.

The second answer is a reply to the first, continuing to quote theory is then used to ignore the facts.

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That’s a question for the philosophers, you study that too?
Oh, its your opinion? Well, why don’t you just say so? Its easier to take you seriously when you present your plain and considered opinion as such rather than dressing up your opinions as facts, refutable ones at that.

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23% for the top 1% sounds like federal only.

Google for “total effective tax rates”

Should get around 17% for the bottom quintile and 30% for the top 5%.

So mostly total us taxes are moderately progressive. However taxes somewhere up within the top 0.5% start going down again till flattening at a romnyesque 15% or so, because it is all favored capital gains.

Also varies slightly by state.

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I think he ran away :wink:

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I absolutely know what I’m talking about. My roads were built by Spanish missionaries and settlers two hundred years ago. My sidewalks and sewers were built by the municipal government in the decades after the Mexican-American War. Residential real estate developers had little to nothing to do with it. Not everyone lives in some 20th century cookie-cutter gated subdivision.

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No, no, no no no nononono.

Figure out the effective federal tax burden. Add the effective state tax burden.
Now add property tax and social security.

Then add sales tax, gasoline tax, luxury tax, rooms and meals tax, cigarette tax, and whatever other taxes your state or town has.

Then add the “taxes” that aren’t called taxes, but are in fact, taxes: Car registrations, various licences and permits for everything from building a barn to owning a dog, usage fees for public areas like parks and docks, parking meters, tolls, et cetera, et cetera.

The problem here is that the federal tax rate does not exist in a vacuum. There are things we need and want that cost money, and somebody needs to pay for them. If the amount of federal funding drops, then the states and cities need to get that money somewhere else: Federal tax goes down, state tax goes up.

What’s worse is that everything below the base income taxes has a much higher impact on the poor:

Pretend your state has a 10% tax on restaurant meals.
A guy making $200k a year takes his wife out for a nice $300 dinner- He pays $30 tax.
A working class family making $52k a year spends $80 at Chilis- They pay $8 tax.
A mom making minimum wage orders pizza for the kids for $30- She pays $3 tax.

High earner pays 3/4 of 1% of his weekly pay.
Blue collar earner pays 0.8% of theirs.
Working mom pays 1% of hers.

Add in all of those other "non"taxes, and the effective rate is probably half of someone’s earnings if they live paycheck to paycheck.

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Plus, the developers in that particular type of subdivision are only responsible for some initial infrastructure, after which the local municipality/county takes over for perpetuity.

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Plus, I bet some of these developers were able to get the land in part because of the local city/county giving them a great deal or using imminent domain in order to procure the land for developement in the first place.

This whole way of thinking, that there is private businesses that operate wholly outside government infrastructures, is just so missing the picture. The modern state clearly paves the way for the modern economy, including helping to create markets. Bourdieu did a study of the French housing market in the postwar period and found exactly that.

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You misspelt “Reagan”.

If purposely disregarding a minority of real circumstances is “fair” to you, just a “simplification”, then I don’t want to hear your views on slavery, gay marriage, or religious tolerance - since all of those topics are fundamentally about whether it is reasonable to ignore the needs, rights and value systems of minorities! If we only have to care about the most obvious segment of any group or category, everything gets Reagan-simple real fast… it seems to me that “fairness” is about making accommodation for every real circumstance, which is why it will always be a moving target and rarely will be achieved.

No, that’s a common misunderstanding that leads straight to Ayn Rand. Evolution is about change over time. It does not require any specific genome at all. Highly evolved creatures incorporate other creatures, with separate genomes, into their evolutionary path; thus domestic animals, cats, adoptive children, even intestinal bacteria genomes are promoted by agencies with entirely separate genetic code, and sometimes one organism will purposely not reproduce while encouraging the reproduction of other organisms - this is all part of evolution. Evolution is merely change, growth, revision, a skew-flip on entropy, the opposite of stasis - the “survival of the fittest” mantra that Randites like to invoke is really an oversimplified statement of the concept of natural selection, which is one of the forces driving evolution, and not evolution itself.

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Zero to total infantilization in six words.

It’s like Hemingway with a personality disorder.

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(Scratches head) So. . . you quote JFK about how life is unfair, then argue for what you think is fair?

I agree that life is unfair, but I don’t mind paying for a cowboy poetry festival, even if I never go to it or give a shit about cowboy poetry, because those kinds of things make life a bit more interesting and enjoyable; all the arts programs in the US probably cost me less than what I pay for going to the movies a couple times a year, so if I happen to stumble on a cowboy poetry festival and get some entertainment out of it, I figure I got my money’s worth. The amount of my money going into arts programs is pretty small compared to the amount of my money going into secret NSA accounts or being funneled through the Defense Department into private companies for weapons we probably don’t need and pay too much for. Life is unfair.

Hey, I don’t mind. Sure, like you I would love it if the Federal Government were run exactly the way I want it to be run. I don’t see that happening anytime soon. You can gripe about the fact that “51% of the population” votes a way you don’t like, but that’s democracy-- if you want people to be in favor of a flat tax then maybe propose that anyone making under $30k a year is totally exempt, because you’re not going to convince anyone to pay more and get less in social services unless you are a hypnotist. BTW-- You probably don’t have to worry about the rights of millionaires, since nearly every member of congress IS a millionaire, you can be sure they are looking out for their own.

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I am in complete agreement with your points.

Of course I was only quoting the average Federal effective tax rates for the sake of the argument that was under discussion - eg: What would an appropriate Federal Flat Tax rate need to be?

I used this article as a source to claim that 80% of Americans pay an effective Federal tax rate below 15%
(Yes I know it’s a USA Today article but the original source is based on IRS data analyzed by the Tax Foundation)
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/perfi/taxes/story/2012-01-19/romney-tax-rate/52682372/1

The effective tax rate, meanwhile, is the amount a taxpayer pays in taxes as a percentage of total income. The average effective federal tax rate for American taxpayers is 11%, according to an analysis of 2009 IRS data by the Tax Foundation, a non-profit research organization. For individuals with adjusted gross income of $50,000 or less, the average effective tax rate is less than 5%, according to the Tax Foundation.That rate doesn’t include the amount taxpayers pay in Social Security and Medicare taxes.

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