Other options:
Cash, undeclared income
1099 IC employees, illegals
The rich cannot be taxed on income.
They can defer or obfuscate income.
One reason to oppose the fake noncollectable taxes is because the governments spend based on projected revenues.
Guess who covers the spread between spending and collected revenues?
The one segment that pays taxes but cannot defer income:
The Middle Class.
Obama made 1.7M and only paid 26% , that’s 9% less then the Bush Rates!
The entire TAX code is nothing but a list of waivers, the taxes are noncollectable on those with the ability to hide, defer or obfuscate income.
When, in fact, they are taxing the gullible unwashed masses, who do not comprehend the sleight of hand.
Sure you can. Redefine rich. 1 cow = proletariat peasant, good.
2 cows = rich kulak. Execute if found to be hiding assets.
They can, but not enough to make any difference to the debt or deficit. Obama is admitting the tax policy he’s following is totally punitive. Not designed to cover expenses, totally about what he think a is “fair”.
Sure you can!
You just can't do it with an "income" tax. If we had a tax system based on consumption rather than income then it would be an ENTIRELY different matter!
We can and do tax “the rich” all the time. The top few percent pay the majority of the taxes. But the middle class is always going to shoulder much of the burden merely because of numbers. There’s too many of them for it to be any other way.
But if you’re a politician, you can endlessly talk about it and convince stupid people to vote for you because you’re a “man of the people”. All the while you and all your cronies are exactly the kind of people that you rail against.
It’s called populist rhetoric.
Works very well on a huge swath of the population.
One problem I have with your theory is that an ordinary business cannot pass on 100% of any cost increase. Saying they could raise prices raises the question as to why they didn’t just raise prices before incurring the new cost.
If everyone could simply pass their taxes on to someone else (businesses to customers, employees to employers, etc.), then maybe no one really pays taxes? We know better than that.
In fact, anyone who could actually pass on an additional expense would not object to incurring the additional expense. And, we know better than that.
People who own small businesses understand this type of issue very well. They understand that they can only spend what is earned in Revenue. If they borrow and spend, i.e., “out in front of their revenue”, they will need to either increase revenue in the future or cut expenses in order to then also serivce their debt.
Even people who work for small businesses have some of this understanding, since they work for an operation where management is the owner or close to the owner and is very concerned with profit and loss. It’s usually rather difficult for employees to “hide” in small busiensses, where in large, publicly-held corporations, it seems like one could simply sign up for a paycheck and sit in a broom closet all day and one would get paid. Small businesses generally do not have endless budgets loaded with money to waste, as, say, the GSA does on Vegas trips.
IMHO, the more small business, the better for the nation. Really, any nation. That is what why Europe can’t get out of debt; the idea of entreprenuerialism is a rather foreign idea to them. “Cashing in”, making fast money, and other romantic notions may exist there, but by and large they love the idea of large businesses that are either nationalized, or quasi-nationalized, or so big they seem nationalized. Most of the entrepreneurially-minded folks came to America.
IMHO...
Can’t tax anyone while robbing them and/or regulating against their efforts to start production businesses, and much domestic manufacturing is necessary for large amounts of sustainable revenues. We know where this debt regime is going. Good post, BTW.
It shouldn’t matter.
If the country went back to Constitutional government , tariffs would fund the government and no one would be taxed on their income.
It’s easier to think about it like this: You can confiscate all the assets and wealth of the top 2,500 richest people in the US and you won’t get enough money to run the federal government (forget state and local) for 60 days.
And you won’t have that money to tax or take again.
This is why “taxing the rich” always TRICKLE’s down to us all.
It’s basically slaveholder mentality. When the rate of return becomes undesirably low....of course all you need to do is beat them harder.
Simple solution.
Raise the tax on capital investment of a million dollars and up, to make the profit from starting a business more competitive with owning treasuries.