[waterglassFull]

If you are fortunate enough to be in a position where you're earning enough to pay 40% tax then great for you!

Paying tax is good for society, what's not great is companies avoiding it. The latter doesn't negate the former.

[callamdelaney]

Oh, it's great that it's great society. Sucks pretty hard for him though.

[um_ya]

"Pay your fair share".

I cringe every time I hear this from people.

Rich people pay WAY more than what they get back from the gov.

[dragonwriter]

> Rich people pay WAY more than what they get back from the gov.

Only if you ignore the role of the government in defining and enforcing (violently, where necessary) property rights, which is what allows “rich people” —particularly rich through various forms of intangible, indirect, and directly-physical-but-beyond-immediate-personal-supervision property — to, as such, even exist.

[medvezhenok]

Rich people can extract value - i.e. park $1B into S&P500, and reap $40M in returns every year. How much work did they do to do the above? Zero (if they inherited 1B). How much are they taxed on it? 20 percent of $40M = $8M.

Where as someone who worked 40 hours a week for the whole year and made $200K gets taxed... exact same 20% effective (federal), and another ~15% (employer+employee) in FICA.

Part of the value of paying taxes is to ensure that the people who's labor you're extracting value from don't rebel and rise up against you.

[callamdelaney]

You’re making up numbers. Nobody just gets a billy. Someone had to work very, very hard for that. That’s what libbies forget. Money isn’t given, it’s earned.

[three14]

Rich people don't usually get handouts from the government, but they get something more valuable - a social order, enforced by the government, that allows them to be rich. Suppose you were rich, but you lived in a place where rich people tended to get kidnapped and held for ransom - being rich wouldn't be quite as good of a deal. The social order disproportionately benefits the rich, so they should pay more to keep it going.

[dariosalvi78]

well, the idea is that the richer you are the more you contribute to society.

[callamdelaney]

Wouldn’t we achieve the same with a flat tax rate?

[medvezhenok]

We should also separate the concept of fairness from the reality of wealth in today's society. If a robot is doing the work which makes workers irrelevant, is that the fault of the workers? Should the productivity of the robot be taxed? (I believe it should - otherwise we are in a capitalist dystopia)

[um_ya]

> I believe it should - otherwise we are in a capitalist dystopia

Should we tax the automobile for displacing the horse stableman.