TheJach.com

Jach's personal blog

(Largely containing a mind-dump to myselves: past, present, and future)
Current favorite quote: "Supposedly smart people are weirdly ignorant of Bayes' Rule." William B Vogt, 2010

Rich fool buys something frivolous, therefore...

Tax the rich! So an annoying motif of progressive and liberal news outlets lately is this. They'll find something they have some issue with and always conclude with "tax the rich". What saves them from being as bad as conservatives is they don't additionally say "you shouldn't be allowed to do it." Here's one example:



They later had an update because apparently the house wasn't up to building codes and was ant/termite infested. They were still hammering the tax the rich point and didn't apologize, though. They were also very skeptical about the excuse, which is fine, it's good to be skeptical of people's proclaimed motives. Here's a more recent video.



(Notice the laugh at the end, the genuine laugh, it's very similar to the mockery of a rich person in the first video and others. So smug.)

Also, $225? That's something everyone can afford, even homeless people. And come on, who gets vagina wigs? Prostitutes with crabs/lice and other lower-middle class people who think it's neat. Not millionaires. The Wii was $250 at launch, are you going to call everyone who got one a rich fool who needs to be taxed more?

I'm in favor of simplifying the tax code first, and making it fair later. Here's what's not complicated about the income tax: the amount of tax. It's a small table that fits on a page. So whether you're a fan of flat taxes (of % or amount), progressive taxes, regressive taxes, or bracketed taxes, it's still very simple to calculate. You pay tax_percent * taxable_income.

The complicated part and the other 71,000 pages of tax code is devoted to defining what counts as "taxable income". So I'm in favor of drastic simplification, by removing the income tax. When we have that accomplished, we can talk about where to go from there to make it more fair. For a progressive that means figuring out a way to tax the rich that doesn't involve income taxes. (With Romney capital gains taxes are starting to come back into the picture, but I firmly believe if someone has the smarts to set up a passive income for themselves, no matter how much money it generates, that's off-limits and shouldn't even be 15%.)

Update: let's tax the rich [more]. (They never specify less or more!) Then let's fuck the poor and force them to eat their children.


Posted on 2012-01-22 by Jach

Tags: government, philosophy, rant

Permalink: https://www.thejach.com/view/id/230

Trackback URL: https://www.thejach.com/view/2012/1/rich_fool_buys_something_frivolous_therefore

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