[lockhouse]

This! Every time I hear about a new tax for the rich, somehow the middle class end up actually paying it.

The rich have every tool in their arsenal to limit their tax liability. When you can afford the best accountants, lawyers, and politicians that money can buy, you can ensure that you will never have to pay your fair share. Oh, and even if a new law somehow does make their costs go up, they'll just pass it on to the middle class by raising the prices on whatever they sell to us to make money.

Unintended consequences are real.

[paulddraper]

"The poor often say, “‘Why don’t the rich pay for it?’ or ‘The rich should pay more in taxes and give it to the poor.’” However, the real rich never pay taxes. The people who pay taxes are the educated, middle class."

- Rich Dad, Poor Dad

[specialist]

If Books Could Kill's review of Rich Dad, Poor Dad was kind of fun.

https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/if-books-could-kill/ric...

https://www.reddit.com/r/IfBooksCouldKill/comments/12dg2r6/i...

[camgunz]

I don't think this is true, but aside from that, what would you do instead?

[lockhouse]

Reduce government waste. You could leave entitlement programs completely intact and still cut billions of dollars in spending without anyone but heavy hitting political donors noticing. Then simplify the tax code with straight forward graduated income tax brackets without exceptions or deductions.

[camgunz]

I looked around for lists of waste, fraud, and abuse and found this [0], and while I'm loathe to use The Heritage Foundation as a source let's just stipulate we could save something like $300B a year if we deleted all this stuff. That isn't even 5% of the budget, like you're not gonna tackle climate change with that kind of investment, especially if you're scouring all the new green policies to ensure they're minimally wasteful (also imagine the meta-bureaucracy needed for this).

I love the idea of simplifying the tax code, but I think if you're arguing it's useless to tax the rich I think you have to think that would be useless too, right? We'd need to actually have the rich pay their rate, but you're saying that doesn't work.

[0]: https://www.heritage.org/budget-and-spending/report/50-examp...

[lockhouse]

I mean simplify the tax code to the point where it is so simple there are no loopholes for the rich to use.

[paulmd]

The problem is that your loophole is my socially-significant deduction. Why wouldn’t we want to allow deductions for insulation and energy efficiency, or electric cars?

Every deduction exists because someone wants it to exist. And “eliminate all deductions” lasts until someone goes “but what about the child credit” or any other issue.

This will continue as long as Americans continue to be averse to the idea of actual cash transfers and continue to use the tax code as a backdoor system for remitting subsidies and credits.

[camgunz]

I understood your argument to be that the rich tend to find ways to pass on their taxes, which I might even agree with--maybe, so I was thinking that if taxes don't do it then what would. I agree with my sibling though: the tax code is where we've subsidized people for generations now because of our discomfort with giving benefits to Black Americans. I think it would be hard to convert all that into equivalent benefit programs, and I think that's why people on the right advocate so much for it, because the likely end result is that many of those programs are cut, and the rich still only pay capital gains.