When I read or hear, “Nobody likes paying taxes”, it really bugs me. Nobody wants to pay a disproportionate amount, but I like paying taxes because I connect the dots. I’m not saying Congress spends all of our tax dollars wisely, but a good chunk of the dough buys us some pretty good stuff. If you’re curious about what that stuff might be, consider moving to Somalia or Afghanistan, or (insert your own destination), and then think about what we have that they don’t. Connect those dots. How much is it worth for you to have: Clean drinking water wherever you go in the country, a stable currency, good roads, electricity when you flip a switch, health care, police and fire departments, public schools from kindergarten through college, etc., etc., etc. (This list of dots is very long.)
A quote from the article:
Mr. Siemens does have a concern about fairness. He believes that lower-income households are not paying enough in taxes. ‘By any measure, the wealthy are still paying a disproportionate amount of their income in taxes,’ he said. ‘Is that fair or not fair? I don’t know, but I have an issue with the dramatic reduction of taxes at the low end because I think everybody needs some skin in the game.’
A “disproportionate” amount?
Right.
Let’s increase taxes on the poor. Because they don’t have enough “skin” in the game.
Folks who think the wealthy (so-called job creators) are already paying too much in taxes like to fall back to a misleading statistic. That statistic shows that when you group the wealthiest Americans together, their collective taxes represent a larger percentage of total taxes paid.
Let’s just have a quick look-see, okay?
If I make $10,000,000.00, (ten million), and pay 15% in taxes, ($1,500,000.00), and you make $40,000.00, (forty thousand), and pay 20% in taxes, ($8,000.00), the amount of money I pay in taxes literally dwarfs your payment. (No kidding.) It doesn’t matter how many millionaires you group together. If their combined income grossly exceeds the combined income of everybody else, the result will be the same.
But here’s the deal. You can’t group all these people together when determining what’s fair and what’s unfair. Income taxes are paid by individuals, and individual incomes are how fairness must be derived.
Look, if I’m making $10 Extremely Large, (We’re talking millions here), and I pay out $1.5 EL in taxes, I still have $8.5 EL to play with. Eight and a half million will buy you some impressive bling. Hell, I could pay 95% in taxes and STILL have over $450,000.00 more than you at the end of the day. But you . . . you non-job creator . . . you have $32,000.00 left over after taxes. And since you probably have a couple of nose-leaking brats running about, you probably think you need all of that $32K just to make ends meet, so you don’t even think about bling. Or buying a house. Or a new car. Or shopping at Whole Foods. Or a vacation to anywhere.
See, the crux of this issue is fairness to the individual, not the group. Simply put, 20% of your $40K income is hugely different when compared to 15% of my $10 million. You can’t do anything but survive with what’s left over from your taxes. But I can cruise the world, buy numerous houses and cars, shop anywhere I want to shop, fly First Class and do pretty much whatever I want, whenever I want.
So what’s fair? If I’m rich because I live in America, and have greatly profited from everything this country has to offer, I should pay more, (a lot more), than somebody who’s just barely getting by.
And if you become wealthy because you took advantage of all the great things this country has to offer? Good for you! Bravo!
Now go pay your fair share and say thank you to everybody else who chipped in so you could be successful.
