Why would they pay income tax, if the point is to redistribute the money collected back to them?
Seems like instead of collecting $x amount of tax from them in order to give it back in benefits, we could just not have them pay tax (which is the case currently).
The real answer is - raise their wages, and then they will be paying more in federal taxes (just like the upper quartiles are).
USA lower tier professionals (Doctors, Lawyers, Programmers, have a anticompetitive racket - they should all get a 20-30% net haircut in salary, tech should be regulated, we should increase admission to med-school and allow nurse practitioners to serve as doctors, etc.). I say this as someone who benefits greatly from the current system, but also realizes how fucked up it is.
Finance people should be taxed out the wazoo - watching stocks tick up and down on the market is a waste of time and most of them defraud people anyway, estate and wealth tax should be a thing, if they try to denounce citizenship to get away, immediate tax of 50% of [unrealized] profits (we currently do 20%).
Even that wouldn't get us back to how things were in the 1960s, but it would at least be closer, and probably makes things better in the mean time.
I'm not denying that programmers get paid a lot or that our taxes shouldn't be higher but it's a different situation from being a doctor or a lawyer. I have no degree and am entirely self-taught. I would not be able to practice law or medicine without getting one. However, I am a professional software engineer.
Programmers get paid a lot because the market is extremely competitive. Doctors get paid a lot because healthcare in the US is essentially one massive cartel and incredibly inefficient as a result. In most countries, doctors and programmers make similar salaries.
I think the term "software engineer" is sort of meaningless. I know someone who builds ssis packages and while he does know T-SQL, he is relatively unfamiliar with transactions, cannot describe how a balanced tree index works, and will not complete an SQL query without using "nolock".
I have never seen him produce a working program in any dot net language, or for that matter any procedural language except maybe visual basic for applications (excel macros maybe). I think he tried to learn php but gave it up. He also calls himself a software engineer. He makes some good money tho, he's in management.
I rarely see this with other engineering disciplines. Its always the computer programmers lol
Sure, anyone can call themselves that, but if you give me a resume with only SQL on it and you want a programming job, I will definitely start asking about other languages and trying to gauge general experience.
I don’t really care what you call me but I will call myself a software engineer because I have a depth of understanding in how to solve problems with software in a consistent way. I’ve always had an engineering mindset, I grew up in a family of engineers. It’s just the term I prefer.
My turn: do you expect more than half of all households in America to be paying no federal income tax at all?