[jerrac]

> ...the poor need to pay their "fair share"

The basic idea is that the Government should treat everyone equally. Treating someone differently because they have a lower income than others is discriminatory. Just as treating someone with a higher income differently is discriminatory.

Plus, as soon as you open the law up to treating people differently based on some arbitrary criteria, you open it up to corruption. A few "bribes" here and there, and suddenly this company is part of a group that gets special treatment. Or this rich person is able to avoid paying extra taxes because of some loophole created because the Government treats some group differently.

Thus, it's not about the "poor" paying their fair share. It's about everyone paying their fair share.

[sdenton4]

Treating someone differently because they have a lower income than others is discriminatory.

Wealth is not a protected class; unlike gender, race, and religion, we don't have a legal mandate to avoid making decisions based on a person's wealth.

It's about everyone paying their fair share.

What does 'fair' mean, though? Another 'fair' scheme might be that everyone pays the same raw amount (rather than a fixed proportion of their income). After all, isn't it discriminatory to include a person's income in the formula for how much one should pay? Our tax code then looks like:

Tax(person) = requiredRevenue / nPopulation

Unfortunately, this ends up requiring poor people to pay more than they actually generate, requiring government to throw the poor in jail for tax evasion and tax more to cover the cost of the prisons.

Ok, so we should be allowed to use a person's income as a parameter to the tax equation. The 'flat' tax scheme is to use a formula like:

Tax(person) = fixedRatio x person.Income

The fixed ratio can again be figured out by looking at total income of the population and the required revenue.

Two major criticisms (amongst many): a) The marginal utility of money is greatly increased when you don't have much of it. A 15% tax on $20k a year will lead to eviction, hunger and health problems, creating social ills that we'll need government programs to deal with. Or they'll just not pay the tax, so again with the prisons. And again, the overall tax needs to be increased to deal with a stupid choice in the tax code. This is inefficient and arguably unfair.

b) Furthermore, if we don't want to punish the poor for being poor, we have to reduce the ratio, meaning we greatly reduce investment in infrastructure, education, etc, mainly as a result of undertaxing the wealthy to avoid punishing the poor. This also seems hella backwards.

So maybe we end up with something like:

Tax(person) = min(0, r_0 + r_1 person.Income + r_2 (person.Income - baseIncome)^2)

with r_i fixed coefficients. So now we have four parameters to choose (or more, if we want a more general polynomial). And suddenly this requires real policy decisions to be made with some nuance...

So to me, it comes down to a question of whether we want to over-simplify the question of how to fund government - negatively impacting either a broad class of the population or drastically degrading the services provided by government - or whether we trust a segment of the civil service to do something a bit more nuanced.

I come down on the 'fix the fucking government' side, personally.

[gherkin0]

>> Treating someone differently because they have a lower income than others is discriminatory.

> Wealth is not a protected class; unlike gender, race, and religion, we don't have a legal mandate to avoid making decisions based on a person's wealth.

Discrimination and protected classes are two different concepts. It seems like you're arguing here that something shouldn't be thought of as discrimination because the discrimination isn't occurring against a legal "protected class." That's wrong. For one, we had unfair discrimination before we ever had "protected classes."

[jerrac]

> What does 'fair' mean, though?

Just remove 'fair' from the sentence.

> a) The marginal utility of money is greatly increased when you don't have much of it. A 15% tax on $20k a year will lead to eviction, hunger and health problems, creating social ills that we'll need government programs to deal with. Or they'll just not pay the tax, so again with the prisons. And again, the overall tax needs to be increased to deal with a stupid choice in the tax code. This is inefficient and arguably unfair.

I disagree. If you know exactly how much money you have to pay each month, you can budget for it. A well planned budget can make $20K a livable income. I grew up in a family of 4 at that level. We tithed 10% of our income on top of the taxes we paid. We never were on Government welfare. And I never went hungry or didn't have a home. It wasn't easy, lots of people helped us, but I never realy realized we were "poor" until I went to college.

Sure it's just my family, but I'm pretty sure a lot of other families I knew as a kid were in similar situations.

> b) Furthermore, if we don't want to punish the poor for being poor, we have to reduce the ratio, meaning we greatly reduce investment in infrastructure, education, etc, mainly as a result of undertaxing the wealthy to avoid punishing the poor. This also seems hella backwards.

The goal is to help make it so that the poor are no longer poor. Government overspending, discriminatory taxation, loophole filled regulation, etc, helps mess things up so that it's really hard for the poor to stop being poor.

Fixing the tax code would be one step in solving the overall problem.

[th0waway]

my parents lived off of grits (we're from the South) for three weeks when they were first married. They made it, with no help from the government - and my Dad never finished school, and could barely read. A lot of people have expectations of success without work.