It’s no secret that, in America at least, people are more likely than ever to exist on two polar opposite ends of the spectrum on just about every front. For every person who thinks taxing the ultra rich is the answer to our country’s money problems, there’s at least one who thinks it isn’t.
If you’re in the former category, you’re probably curious about the arguments against, right?
If you said yes and you’re looking to better understand, check out these honest and thoughtful explanations below!
14. Corrupt and inefficient.
It doesn’t matter how much money we give the government they’re incredibly inefficient and I feel like the extra money earned from taxing the rich is going to be blown on things no one asked for.
Politicians are corrupt, they’ll have no problem giving it to special interest buddies instead of programs the vast majority of the country would agree on.
13. It would screw over the average taxpayer.
I don’t think a lot of people understand what the proposed new tax laws actually do.
The laws would force banks to turn over all banking data for anyone with over $10k in annual expenditures, and hire 80k new IRS agents to audit it all. $10k in annual expenditures is everyone with a job and a bank account.
Trust me the rich will be fine with their army of lawyers. The average Joe however will be screwed.
12. Because lobbying.
It’s an argument against trusting our politicians to continually take more and more money and watching the same crap not get better after time and time of allowing it.
Our problems with taxation are in direct correlation to the corruption within our government. You imagine somehow lobbying will eventually affect everything in the government but somehow not this?
11. No one is looking out for the little guy.
The idea that a group of politicians who supposedly act in our interests proposed that, especially with its original threshold ($600!) shows how absolutely incompetent and corrupt all of those people are.
10. Because waste.
You ever worked at a business? I mean with more than about 500 employees.
I work at an awesome company that has great people and generally kicks a$$. We STILL “waste” a lot of time and money. Even great people in great systems MAYBE spend about 10% of their time on truly value added activity.
The reason I being this up is that people get all s*%tty about government “inefficiency” when they compare it to some mythical 100% efficient operation. Real human endeavors at scale are wildly inefficient even at their best.
This government efficiency is even further dragged down by people who hold this belief and try to vote for people who want to go in and mess up the system. Many of the inefficiency you’d complain about was countermeasures to satisfy someone who would rather burn the system down than let money be spent regardless of outcomes.
9. They just want more power.
I have no problem with making wealthy people paying their fair share. The problem is, I don’t want the feds to invent new ways to get peoples money, like the “unrealized capitol gains” tax.
It’s always disingenuous, they JUST want more power. They have plenty of mechanisms to collect revenue already. Also, if they invent a new tax program, they will inevitably have to hire thousands more IRS agents.
Why not simply close the loopholes on already existing tax laws to make them pay their share? Because they don’t really want to go after the rich, they want the political appearance of going after the rich. Just remember a few weeks ago they wanted to look in everyone’s bank account over $600 to go after “wealthy tax cheats”.
We all know how it works, the wealthy don’t have to cheat; everything they do is legal!
8. Be more specific.
We do tax the rich. You need to be more specific if you want to have an actual conversation about this.
The is the same bullshit as the Defund the Police campaign. Liberals are so f**king bad at messaging things in a way that can actually lead to change. (I’m liberal btw.) It makes me question if these people actually want changes or just want to be seen as progressive/woke/whatever by their peers.
7. They don’t trust the government.
I also don’t trust any new tax scheme to stay only targeting the wealthy.
It’s easy to favor a tax like on “unrealized capital gains” that “only effects the top 1%”… just like the income tax did when it was initially implemented.
This is honestly my biggest problem with the whole tax issue in the first place. When it was originally passed the only way they got enough votes to pass it was because it was only going to effect the rich people. Now everyone has to pay income tax.
6. A serious issue.
I have a serious issue with the way that the government currently spends tax dollars. I don’t think taxing the rich will actually fix our problems, because inevitably the government will end up just spending on the wrong things. Our government currently has enough revenue to fund the things we want, but they chose to spend it on on the military or special interests rather than healthcare, infrastructure, and education.
Furthermore, I don’t think income taxes and wealth taxes are the way to address income inequality. I would much rather see a dramatically higher minimum wage with a corresponding increase in taxes which are guaranteed to go to healthcare or education. This would move money from the actual wealth sinks back into the economy. No individual billionaire has a fraction of the money in cash that large companies have, so we need to actually target where the money is.
Finally, I favor a value added tax and corporate taxes as the ideal way to collect taxes. I don’t think it’s right that someone can pay income tax and then also have to pay tax on capital gains made from that income and then also a wealth tax on that same money. I am opposed to capital gains tax, especially short term capital gains tax, because it makes it more difficult for middle class individuals to build wealth and financial security. We need a simplified tax code and then we need to fund the IRS sufficiently to enforce it.
5. It’s not specific enough.
I would even argue that trying to tax the 1% is too big. It needs to be like the top .1%.
We don’t need to go after lawyers and doctors and small business owners making 500k a year. Its the ones making 500k a day.
Those doctors and lawyers are already paying out the nose anyway, because all of their income is earned at a job, the same way a clerk at Walmart making 7/hr does. So they end up paying like a 30% effective rate compared to the billionaire and hedge fund crowd that pay like 10% (if even).
4. It’s a spending issue, not an income one.
If the government were to confiscate everything from every billionaire in the US and somehow liquidate it at 100% efficiency (lol) it wouldn’t even fund the federal budget for a full year.
It’s not a taxation issue, but a spending one. If they were actually responsible with our money, they could easily fund all the important stuff, give everyone a nice tax cut, and still be left with enough of a surplus to start chipping away at that obscenely large national debt
3. It won’t close any loopholes.
How do you close tax loopholes without making more tax laws?
Closing tax loopholes is exactly what the new proposed laws are aimed at doing.
2. It’s not the answer you’re looking for.
Redditors who think taxing the rich 90% will make your life better in any discernible way, why?
The 5 richest Americans have 750B worth of wealth (note: this is obviously not liquid). If you confiscated all of this wealth, somehow liquidated it all without crashing the stock market and subsequently lowering the value of all of it, and gave it to Americans, each American would get two-thousand dollars.
You just erased Musk, Zuckerberg, Gates, Bezos, and Page of the face of the planet, and you have $2000 to show for it. Whose money do you go after next? Lets say you erase all the billionaires and distribute their money. You get your 1 time payment of $10K. Now what? That money won’t last you. On top of that, there’s no more ultra-wealthy people to confiscate money from. So you get your 5-6 months of rent/mortgage paid for and that’s it. We’re done. No more money to take.
I’m not against taxing the rich. I’m just not sure why people think taxing the rich is the answer to their problems. Not to mention something like the wealthiest 10% of people already pay 80% of all taxes or something crazy like that.
1. It won’t fix anything.
It’s a bit lengthy, but hope you find it informative.
Prior to 1991’s economic reform, India used to have income tax rates as high as 75% for higher income individuals. It led to underreporting of incomes, more black money in the economy, lesser investment incentives, and migration of high networth individuals to other countries.
There also was an act called Monopolies Restrictions and Trade Practices Act (MRTP ACT) which kept an upper limit to the size of the corporates (400 crore rupees annual revenue). No company was allowed to expand beyond that. Corporate Income Tax was as high as 50% for domestic firms and 65% for foreign enterprises operating in India.
So, higher tax rates and glass ceiling for corporates never allowed India to have a decent economic growth, resulting in widespread poverty and malnutrition and stunting.
It was only after 1991, when the tax rates were reduced for both the individuals and the corporates, that India was able to achieve a GDP growth of as high as 9%-10%.
Per capita GDP improved significantly, India’s population increased 50% since 1991, and yet the poverty rates have halved in these 30 years, Effectively uplifting millions of people out of poverty.
So, yeah, higher income tax rate didn’t work for us and raising tax in the US will only help countries like India, Bangladesh, Vietnam.
Even if you don’t agree, I think it’s a good thing to listen to the other side.
If you don’t want to raise taxes on the billionaire class, tell us why – and what you’d like to do instead – down in the comments!
