Progressive taxes harm the middle class whilst the rich figure out ways to avoid them. If you want the average person to do well, you should support a flat tax.
The top 1% earned 21% of aggregate income, and paid 40% of income taxes. Clearly the rich are indeed being impacted by progressive taxes.
A flat tax would give them a huge tax break, which would either lead to higher taxes on everyone else, cutting of social services, or an increasingly large deficit
If you assume that the rich always figure out ways to avoid progressive taxes, why would you not also assume they would figure out ways to avoid paying a flat tax as well?
The thing that makes taxes complicated isn't the progressive tax table of 'pay X% on the first Y dollars you make, then pay Z% on the next W dollars, etc.', its the determination of what is and isn't taxable. That is where the rich game the tax system, and that's something that changing the rate schedule from progressive to flat will not fix.
If you want to close loopholes, eliminate deductions primarily used by the rich, put limitations on tax-exempt trusts, properly fund the IRS so they can actually audit rich people's tax returns again, etc., to actually capture more taxes from the rich... great! We should do that! But that all of that is completely orthogonal to changing the question of flat vs. progressive taxation.
Simply changing to a flat tax will lower the tax burden on the rich and increase the tax burden on the poor and middle class. All other things being equal, a change to a flat tax will hurt the average person, not help them.
> If you assume that the rich always figure out ways to avoid progressive taxes, why would you not also assume they would figure out ways to avoid paying a flat tax as well?
Every modern economy in the world has already solved this issue. VAT. A VAT is a consumption tax, there is no way to avoid a VAT, even with the resources of a super wealthy individual. A VAT is progressive because the more you spend the more you end up paying. A VAT can also be scaled on types of goods (so a higher VAT on Yacht's for example).
Income taxes, in general, flat or not, are abhorrent, hostile to freedom, and generally should be abolished.
> If you want the average person to do well, you should support a flat tax.
Regressive taxation has never not increased wealth gaps. Say you bothered with a flat tax of 9%, which would raise taxes significantly on most Americans. We already have this problem with payroll taxes that are essentially flat, which is why tax relief for the poor has always come in payroll tax decreases rather than income tax decreases.
Payroll taxes are not flat, they are in fact regressive (unlike a flat tax, which is by definition neither progressive nor regressive). Since social security tax is capped, the more you beyond the social security tax limit, the lower your effective payroll tax rate becomes.
No serious reputable anything has ever found a flat tax to be anything but a huge giveaway to the rich as well.
Just fund the IRS and stop letting the foxes run the hun house, ie. get money out of politics and stop letting a few people and their rich friends make all the rules to favor that small cadre.
You might as well tell people to make other people stop being corrupt. Humans are corruptible full stop. For a funny recent example see Russel Brand's last YouTube video on the US Congress's insider trading clown shows, and then ask yourself if there's any way possible to get this legislative body to "stop letting a few rich people and their rich friends make all the rules to favor that small cadre."
The only decent solution would be a vastly simpler system with enough transparency and accountability the average person could make sense of it.
We don't punish white collar crime for the same reasons. If you made it illegal to get outside money for politicians, and made the punishment significant, the rats would scurry and "normal" people could get involved in the process. The way it works now we just get rich people looking after rich people problems because theres no way to overcome all the money flowing around with any regular success.
We can try to change government, but do a quick thought experiment: how many resources does it take to manage shared infrastructure and services for 20 people? 200? 2000? 20,000? 200,000? 2,000,000?
Go on up to 350mil.
It's not easy, and you can't just "tear it down". You can envision some ways to streamline some things, but the problem is just mind boggling gigantic.
Poor people, hell half of middle class don't own land or property.
Land and the resources on them should be taxed for the value they give whoever owns them. This could essentially pay for Basic Income, and it's not something you can 'offshore', and it even makes foreign investors pay nice taxes, (we could even tax them more).
Flat income tax schemes, like sales and use taxes, and user fees, are all regressive: striking the poor harder than the classes above them. The appeal of flat taxes (and the others mentioned) is their perceived simplicity in both assessment and collection. But that's an assumption that flies in the face of historical practice.
As you say, the rich always find a way to avoid taxes of all kinds. They pay accountants and politicians to ensure that. The middle class may not have many politicians on their payroll, but they do have accountants -- and have learned how to use them. Besides, the progressivity (a word that the tech giants still don't know how to spell) of our current tax structure is inconsistent and intentionally incoherent.
Just a note: the US tax system seems to have been at its fairest (a very relative term) during the late 1940s through to the Kennedy tax cuts in the early 60s when the highest rates were in the 90% range and when estate taxes still took a credible bite out of ultra wealthy generational wealth. Of course all that money collected didn't go to help eradicate poverty. It mostly went to build warships, bombers, missiles and the nukes they carried.
>like sales and use taxes, and user fees, are all regressive
Under no circumstances are consumption taxes "regressive". Consumption taxes are the only tax any free people should tolerate. The poor will never pay more in outright dollars, or in percentage. It's only "regressive" if you you stupidly count money that isn't spent, which is entirely pointless because of course money not spent won't get hit with a consumption tax (it will once it DOES get spent, the more you spend the more you pay, which means consumption taxes are PROGRESSIVE). Furthermore, any good implementation of a consumption (VAT, etc.) tax is going to tax luxury goods at much higher rate than consumer staples.
> Under no circumstances are consumption taxes "regressive".
They absolutely are “regressive” in the objective sense “progressive/
” and “regressive” are applied to taxation (which is distinct from normative uses of the pair, which are common in other areas of political discussion), in that they tend to tax a lesser (absolute and marginal) share of income with increasing income, due to declining marginal propensity to consume.
> Consumption taxes are the only tax any free people should tolerate.
There are obviously an infinite number of potential systems of moral axioms for which this is true (the most trivial being any in which it is taken as a moral axiom), and also an infinite number in which it is not. However, as you’ve provided neither the basic principles in which your belief in this is grounded or your reasoning connecting the conclusion to those principles, you’ve provided no reason for anyone who doesn't already hold this belief to adopt it.
> Furthermore, any good implementation of a consumption (VAT, etc.) tax is going to tax luxury goods at much higher rate than consumer staples.
That's an interesting “No True Scotsman”, but concrete consumption tax proposals (e.g., “FairTax”) often do not do this.
>in that they tend to tax a lesser (absolute and marginal) share of income with increasing income
It is pointless to look at income in this regards. You come to a false conclusion that a tax is regressive because the percentage of income is taxed less for the "wealthy". This only due to the fact that the wealthy are spending a smaller percentage of their income.
You can only look at money SPENT, not at income. If someone makes 500 mil a year but only spends 80k, then you you compare to someone who made 80k and spent 80k then yeah it appears "regressive" because they paid the same in taxes (assuming they bought the same things). However when the person that made 500 mil goes to spend they remaining 420 min, they will be taxed. You can keep all the money you want, stick in your ears, put it a pool and dive in it like you Scrooge McDuck, who cares, once you actually try to do something useful with the money, that is when it would be taxed. More money you spend, more you are taxed, that is progressive.
> It is pointless to look at income in this regards.
Whether or not you subjectively think it is pointless or not, the well-established meaning of “progressive” and “regressive” taxation does loom at income.
If you want to invent your own terminology to reflect the considerations you believe are important, great, but overloading established terminology used consistently by people with varying normative beliefs about the subject matter to mean something completely different because you don't like the way it maps terms on to facts isn't helpful in communication.
I happen to mostly agree with you, but to play devil's advocate, consider the practical reality that government (as currently expressed) is expensive. New Hampshire is a great example of your model working well: nearly half of its tax revenue is consumption-derived (compared to ~10% of New York's). Except New York collects more than double the tax per head versus NH.
Let's assume that we can't easily shrink the size of government. Middle class incomes are just too lucrative of a piggy bank, which is why tax policy is so reliant on it. How do you make up for the $3.3 trillion in income and payroll tax revenues without taking people's property? The US only imported $2.5 trillion in 2019, so you'd need an import tariff rate of 130%! If you used a federal sales tax instead, you'd likely need a rate of > 24% to replace the income tax (extrapolating from New Jersey as a reasonable lower bound).
> Progressive taxes harm the middle class whilst the rich figure out ways to avoid them. If you want the average person to do well, you should support a flat tax.
If the concern is "the rich figure out ways to avoid" taxes, there's no reason why you need a flat tax to address that. A progressive tax can abolish deductions, etc. just like some flat tax proposals do.
