[lovich]

There are certain deductions that go away as your income goes up which is effectively an increase in tax rate as well. Student loan deductions for instance are 2500 I believe, but start going down after you break 80k. Then there's things like the social security payments which stop at 127,200 in 2017 so every dollar after that has a lower tax rate. It's very complicated but the last time I did taxes I paid north of 40% effective

[jhall1468]

> It's very complicated but the last time I did taxes I paid north of 40% effective

It's not that complicated. In order for you to have a 40% effective tax rate (including Federal, State, Local and FICA), assuming you ONLY took the standard deduction and you file single, you'd need an income of just over $450,000/year.

https://smartasset.com/taxes/income-taxes#VL01ZILZtI

That assumes you have 1 exception, no deductions for retirement (which would actually reduce your effective rate) and only taking the standard deduction (you can't get lower!)

In fact, if you want to tax EVERY POSSIBLE tax into account (sales, property, fuel, etc), you'd need to make $300,000/year to achieve a 40% effective tax rate across all taxes.

So either you make a mountain of money, you have a terrible accountant, or you are lying.

[thanksgiving]

Unpopular opinion, I know but I think we should try to get rid of as many credits and deductions as possible.

Every time someone take about simplifying the tax code, I bring it up. It will hurt me as well (I'm poor) but it is ok.

If you're in the tax bracket to pay 40%, I'd say I want to raise your taxes you pay but I also want to raise the taxes your overlords pay.

I want higher taxes so we can offer the same services to the wealthy that we offer to the poor. It is the right thing to do. We don't have too many wealthy people in this country. We should be able to include everyone. Can't afford to include people who make too much money? Too bad. The program can't exist.

I would want to create a consensus towards "no income checks". The government should not have any program that qualifies people based on income or assets. Be it Medicare, social security, or Medicaid, food stamps, college tuition, rent subsidies, school lunch or whatever. You should not be able to exclude anyone because they make too much money or have too much money.

Of course, economists will say this is stupid and inefficient and irrational but I say economists are not even people. Nobody is rational in the real world.

[lovich]

I'm not sure how unpopular that is unless you are one of the vested interests behind some of these deductions. The cost of enforcing these regulations seems to grow exponentially as the number of regulations grow. Many proponents of UBI, such as myself, want there to be zero means testing as it would save a significant amount of cost vs all of the current regulation behind things like welfare, unemployment, Medicare, etc.