that may be,but two things to consider...we've been arguing for years about corporations and billionaires not paying their fair shares: the 10,000 layoff didn't happen until last year...so it's a little hard to say that the layoffs caused the issue when the issue has been going on lang before the playoffs...
The Entirely Made Up Claim That Corporations Pay No Taxes
- Thread starter m.knox
- Start date
Corporation don't pay zero income tax because the tax rate is 21%. Yet democrats want to raise the corporate tax rate because some companies don't pay income tax. Maybe they need to look a little deeper.
Perhaps you could dispute the data instead of making generalized posts with no support
Who is going to do the audits? The IRS that the GOP defunded specifically so they can't do audits?
I specifically said roboadvisor or index funds. Wealthfront has a $500 minimum. VTI basically has no minimum. These aren’t just for rich people. Not to mention, you are making quite a leap talking about “rich” people and then jumping all the way down to someone with $2-3K to their name.
And using CC points as some magical trump card for rich people? Yea you can get some nice points. But it’s not some tax-dodging cheat code for the wealthy. And they aren’t just for rich people. I used the Centurion card example because that’s invite only and requires certain assets and spending thresholds that very few achieve. Tons of people can get the other cards. I have an Amex platinum, delta reserve and chase sapphire reserve. I know tons of people with one or multiple of those cards.
I’m not trying to be smug. I’m using myself as a real-world example of the complete idiocy on the left, which confuses billionaires with hardworking families and misleads people into thinking the “rich” or “1%” don’t pay their fair share. The vast majority pay at least their fair share, and possibly more.
Oh, I get that. But here was a measure that could have possibly had an impact and they got it “86’ed”.
Oh, I got that. Just offering more info to buttress your stand.
Top 1% puts one conservatively at $750,000/year. Assuming that’s all wages, FICA SS is capped at $184,500. Earnings beyond this don’t pay that 6.5% tax on income. And, of course, it’s functionally higher than that since a portion of the employer match just comes out of your paycheck.
We’ll just round that to $12K. If I’m earning right at the max, I’m paying the full 6.5%. For someone in the 1%, they pay that same $12K and they’re done. The max FICA SS tax for the top 1% is ~1.6% and it just goes down from there. And, of course, if much or all of their income is passive or investment income, their percentage could be even lower…or zero. AND that income is treated preferentially over sweat income by the tax code.
Just FTR, if I was making $750,000+/year, there’s no way I’m spending a second on this or any other board.
Are you trying to teach me or someone else? I was being frustrated with Ned for saying half the country pays no federal taxes, which isn't true.
I'm not ignoring them, just trying to make sure everyone is using the same baseline. For sure, it's impossible to have a 40% effective federal rate tax rate. I specifically pointed out that the OP had to be specific to federal INCOME taxes in his discussion...and what do you mean "again"
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whoa, Ned didn't say that....he knows better...now if you want to say 50% federal income taxes he might be right..but I'm really not sure the 50% number (that everyone uses) is 100% correct.
Ned knows that we have to raise taxes, and soon, or we're going to have a significant financial crisis that we might not recover from.
The only debate for me is who pays those taxes...
The system caps the amount of earnings subject to SS tax but it also caps the amount of earnings that are used to calculate benefits. You don't pay tax on earnings above a certain amount but you also don't get any more benefits. When it comes time to collect people with high incomes also pay higher tax rates on those benefits.
Your opinion seems to be that wealthy people should continue to pay above the threshold but not collect above the threshold (or at all). In other words change it from a forced retirement saving program to a redistribution of wealth (welfare) program.
Some people are making an assumption that corporations are cheating on their taxes and spending and extra $2 billion on auditors would generate tens of $billions in added revenue. I'm sure that more auditors would catch more stuff but I don't think we really know how much.
Corporations are liable for payroll taxes and you ignore them when you claim that corporations don't pay tax.
As I've discussed before, "fair" is whatever you decide it is.
Here's some excerpts from what I've already posted in similar discussions (it's deja vu all over again, now that the locusts have arrived) ...
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What could be fairer? Whatever you deem fairer. It's not a defined term. So "fairer" could be "most able to pay, pay the most ... by percentage." Or whatever you believe is "fair." It's a conclusion, not a guiding principle.
Yes, for the most part, people celebrate burdens that aren't theirs. They're self-concerned turds. They're so concerned with their own situation that they can't see the bigger picture. In some cases, it's understandable, because they're struggling to stay afloat. In most cases, it's an unnecessarily selfish manifestation. I believe the wealthy should ultimately pay more than they currently do, even though that would be my shared burden. I understand what is necessary, even if it "sucks" that I have to pay out the nose, while Billy pays nothing, or next to nothing. And, yet, I'm not going to voluntarily pay more than I already do, because I don't deem THAT "fair," while others may.
A flat tax unnecessarily burdens poorer people. I don't consider that "fair," even if I end up paying a higher rate than they do under a different system.
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Imagine you have twelve 100 lb. rocks that need to be moved out of your way, or you can’t get the food and water you need to survive, and you only have yourself (as an able bodied man, not your actual decrepit self), your wife (who is an average strength woman) and your 5 year old son to help. You’re all eligible to chip in … what’s the fair work distribution?
In baltimorened’s world, the only true fair allotment is that everyone moves 4 rocks. Most people would say that’s stupid. But ned sticks to his guns, and demands fairness, and his family dies of thirst.
The lesson is, don’t be like ned, and you may not be dead. Understand the flexibility of the term “fairness.”
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Regardless, you may have said that fair is in the minds of the taxpayer, but you also said the only true fair way to distribute the workload, in your mind, is evenly, by a percentage. I'm showing you that there is no inherently fairer (or fairest) way to distribute a burden.
Nobody WANTS to pay taxes. It's a burden we share, to the extent we can share it.
To answer your question, I wouldn't want the 5-year-old to lift all the rocks. I wouldn't want him to lift ANY of the rocks, because he's not capable of doing so. It wouldn't be FAIR to expect him to lift 33% of the rocks, and share the burden equally with the others. Unfortunately, in order to live, that family of 3 will likely have to rely on 100% of the rocks to be moved by the able-bodied man. That's what's "fair" in that situation. And if he whined and said "this isn't fair .. I want everyone to have some skin in the game" ... why, I'd reckon the line to punch him in the face would extend for thousands of miles.
some 90% of filers use the standard deduction...so there's really not a great deal to audit. The system should be able to match the W2, 1099s, estimated taxes and whatever, almost without any human intervention. I'm one of the 90%, and this year I made an error in listing one of my estimated taxes - a $1,000 error. So I was going to prepare an amended return, talked to one of the turbo tax experts and his advice was...do nothing. The system will match your return against it's internal date, make the necessary correction for you and adjust your refund. That's exactly what happened.
So, it's entirely possible, and somewhat probable, that updates to the data system made 10,000 employees redundant. Heck, it's happening all through American industry. So, if 90% of returns are basically reviewed by computers that leaves the remainder of auditors to cover 10% of returns. I don't want to make light of the challenges the IRS faces with those 10%, those returns are a heck of lot more complicated, but that becomes a management problem.
Please tell me how far someone can get if they can only invest $500? Like I said, if you meet with a FA and ask about you options with $500, they will probably tell you to keep it and get a cash back card instead.
The world you live in is completely different from most Americans. You have access to benefits most people can only dream of.
SS used to collect on about 90% of all income. How? Well, you didn't have CEO's making hundreds of times more than the people who actually built things. I'll be happy with raising the limit to get back to that number. You don't really care about "wealth redistribution." We've had wealth redistribution in one direction for decades now and I assume you've been ok with that. What's wrong with turning it the other way for a while?
A few things:
— While SS tax stops at $185K, your income tax rate jumps 8% at $201K, more than making up the difference. You also have other taxes that start kicking in as you climb the income ladder.
— You aren’t accounting for couples paying dual SS. My wife and I both pay the full capped amount, so $24K. Or for 1099 employees who have to pay both ends of the tax.
— SS contributions are capped, but so is the SS benefit. If you uncap SS taxes, you must also uncap the benefit to maintain fairness.
— Families are eligible for $7-8K in earned income tax credit, which offsets much or all of their payroll tax contributions at modest income levels.
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You better check your history. SS taxes started out at 2% split between employee and employer. In 1937 Federal revenue from all sources were $6.2 billion. The part that came from SS tax was $0.3 billion which is 4.8% of all income.
Today the rate has risen to 12.4% split between employee and employer. Social Security tax now accounts for 30% of federal revenue.
SS benefits weren't subject to income tax until 1983. Then it was 50% but today it's 85%.
People like Morgan, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Carnegie, etc were the ultra rich of the day. In fact Rockefeller's wealth represented a larger share of the economy than people like Bezos have today.
You'll take this as me being a poor uneducated person trying to protect billionaires but they're facts. I have no interest in "protecting" billionaires. I actually support higher taxes on these people in order to reduce the debt/deficit. A lot of "progressives" seem to think taxing the rich would lower house, insurance, and grocery prices but there's not math to support such thinking.
Removing the tax cap while not removing the benefit cap turns SS into a wealth redistribution program. Unfortunately I don't think we have much of a choice. We're $39 trillion in debt, adding $2 trillion per year, and we have $80 trillion of unfunded liabilities.
I've supported the idea of a 50% tax (6.2% vs 12.4%) on earnings above the cap in order to add a small degree of what you call fairness. I'd also reduce the COLAs but a small amount just so everybody has a stake in the solution. Something like 98% from higher incomes and 2% from lower incomes but I get accused of tossing granny off the cliff in order to protect billionaires.
You have to work on some mix of age increases, benefit reduction and COLA limits.
I think it’s asinine to hand the government money your entire life for it to then be returned to you in retirement after a dogshit return, so I don’t support any additional funding of the program. Ideally, we phase SS out over time and replace with individual accounts, but I don’t see that happening.
You misunderstood, I think, and I'm probably at fault with how I phrased it.
For the program’s first four decades, Congress set the wage base by statute, adjusting it only through periodic legislation. The base sat at $3,000 from 1937 through 1950, then inched up through a series of congressional acts. The Social Security Amendments of 1977 changed the game by introducing automatic adjustments and accelerating the base so that roughly 90% of all covered wages in the economy would fall below the cap. Congress set specific transitional bases — $22,900 in 1979, $25,900 in 1980, and $29,700 in 1981 — then let automatic indexing take over.
That 90% target hasn’t been revisited by legislation since, and wage inequality has shifted the picture. Because high earners’ wages have grown faster than average wages, a larger share of total earnings now sits above the cap. The Congressional Budget Office has analyzed proposals that would raise the taxable share back to 90%, which tells you the current share has drifted below that mark. This gap is one reason you’ll see policy proposals to raise or eliminate the wage base in Social Security reform debates.
Raising the base is just trying to get it back to the 90% target set by Congress in 1977.
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There is a lack of gratitude and appreciation for the opportunities this country presents, as well as just random luck. Then they get upset at having to pay back into the system that gave them everything they have.
It’s sick.
To be clear, I’m not upset about paying into the system. I am annoyed with several things:
— Paying a ton into the system, and being told I don’t pay my fair share.
— Attempts to force me to pay even more into the system, when I already pay a ton.
— Ignorance at what high earners actually pay in taxes and the resulting erroneous commentary about people not paying their fair share.
— Intentional misleading of the simps who don’t understand taxes by those on the left.
— Conflating high earners and “top 1%” with billionaires, when there is a gigantic chasm of wealth and earnings between the latter and most of the 1%.
— My tax dollars being used for things I don’t approve of, like dependency-inducing entitlements for mentally and physically capable adults.
I love the country, I love capitalism, I appreciate the opportunities that combination affords and I acknowledge that luck plays a role in our circumstances. I can do all of those things and rightly object to the items above.
You know what most Americans hate? Having no money to cover things like car repairs or other emergencies, no money to buy homes, and still being lectured by people like you that you're the one who has it bad.
Yeah, you’re just your run of the mill unintelligent, self-absorbed d-bag. We know. No need to break it out into bullet points.
The kind that thinks they pay too much, or have it rough, or the system is against them, or other people are taking advantage of it. And that, while someone may be the one making too much money, who should pay more, it’s not you. $25K, $50K, $100K, $250K, $1M, $100M, $1B … you’ll find these douches at every income level.
STFU and get ready to pay more taxes.
You would like to think so but I amended my 2022 return last August. It took until this past week (8.5 months) to get a response.
Then give it all up and join the bottom 50% who don't pay sh*t into the system. Enjoy your life rather than bitching about it.
I delivered newspapers when I was a kid. When I was able to drive (16 1/2) I drove to a Merrill Lynch Office and told them I wanted to buy some stock. I bought 1 share of 4 different companies. I quickly learned that broker fees were expensive but some companies had dividend reinvestment plans. If you were a shareholder you could buy additional shares directly from the company without a fee. Texaco became Chevron Texaco and now just Chevron. My $3,000 investment in 1992 is now worth $120,000. Mobil became Exxon Mobil and now just Exxon. My $3,000 investment in 1992 is now worth $80,000. The S&P 500 was at 400 in 1992. Today it's $7400. The key is to live below your means and invest a little bit each year.
Today this can all be done online without a financial advisor. The old expression is "Live like nobody else so that later on in life you can live like nobody else". Live on 90% of your income and invest 10%. Most employers will match some of that in a 401-k plan. The compounding of investment returns takes time but it really works.
Are you saying that most people can only dream of having internet access or access to a company 401-k plan? 72% of private sector employers offer such plans and even more government employers also offer plans.
Yes but you can't cut people off who have been counting on SS for 30+ years.
Thanks for the clarification. I recognize that some lower income wages haven't kept up with inflation. I attribute that to the global economy. We all enjoy cheap products made overseas by people making just a few dollars per hour. The downside is that higher paying manufacturing jobs have gone overseas. Add automation. Today there are more jobs requiring people to work with their heads and fewer jobs for people working with their backs.
Just for fun I looked up the SS tax threshold in 1996. It was $62,700 and an inflation calculator says that would be equivalent to $133,080 30 (+112%) in 2026. The tax cap is actually $184,500 (+194%). Based on that I'd argue that the SS tax cap has more than kept up with rising wages. I think your argument is more that automation and offshoring have caused pay for low skilled jobs to struggle keeping up.
Cool. Glad you mentioned because your posts would not be interpreted as someone who feels that way.
I will say you come across as someone who is angry at the poor and Dems, but don’t focus any of your anger at republicans and billionaires who have more power and aren’t helping you either.
BOTH parties continue allowing loopholes to benefit billionaires and keep racking up debt that then gets passed on to folks like you and others who have disposable income. Your concerns (which I 100% agree with) would come across as more valid if you also highlighted the corporate tax breaks, loopholes, and gutting of the IRS that is robbing this country of the funds it needs to pay for services and pay down debt.
oh, and now we have a president who wants a historic military budget because he’s an ******* who pissed off the world. Thats OUR money he keeps wasting. Including the fines from folks he is letting buy pardons from him.
The flip side is people who worked two jobs just to make ends meet having to listen to people who claim those who came before them had it easy while sipping on a $7 coffee and messaging on their $1,300 phone.
Each generation has it's own struggles. Kids were getting drafted into the Vietnam war in the 70s. People were dealing with 16% mortgages in the 80s. Somehow people got through it.
Some are quick to point out that greed is one of the 7 deadly sins. They fail to mention that envy and sloth are two of the other deadly sins. It's a shame that the issues of the day can no longer be debated without one side pointing the finger at the other side.
Half of people's income is going towards rent, an entire generation can't buy homes, and you're pretending that a cup of coffee is what's standing between them and the American dream?
Not sure why your beef is with working class people spanning generations instead of the obvious problem. Which is a financial system rigged for the rich which creates a K shaped economy that only widens the wealth gap with each generation?