Billionaire likes paying taxes. Wants everyone to.

[weemadando]

Mark Cuban - Getting rich and paying your taxes is the most patriotic thing you can do

Can't copy and paste as phone won't let me.

But what a great statement from one of the richest out there.

[SirNitram]

In constrast, here's A rich GOP Representative whining how he doesn't want to pay more. Video in link.

[DPDarkPrimus]

On BBC World Service today they had a segment about the proposed tax increases, with one of the folks who signed Buffet's open letter paired off against some conservative lobbyist. The conservative lobbyist kept arguing that in fact rich people pay more income taxes than the middle class, even though right before that the billionaire said that the tax code was written up to let folks like him write off the majority of their yearly gains as things other than income, so it doesn't get taxed hardly at all. I'll post a link to the part tomorrow once they have the broadcast split up into chapters.

[MarshalPurnell]

Hardly mutually exclusive. Given the distribution of wealth in the country, the "wealthy" do pay more than the rest of the country in an absolute sense, while still paying at effective rates that are lower than the middle class because of ready access to accountants and benefiting from the capital gains rate. If you have a millionaire paying 10% of his income in taxes, and a guy making $30,000 a year paying 25% of his income in taxes the millionaire still pays more, though of course his rate is lower and he can frankly afford the taxes much more trivially. It's that kind of phrasing without context that lets Republicans turn every argument about tax fairness into a propaganda point about class warfare.

[DPDarkPrimus]

That's just it though - the top income bracket for federal income tax caps at $250,001+. And the capital gains bracket stops at $372,951+ for single/married and jointly-filed. So where does all the "burden" on eight-figure earners come from?

[Alyrium Denryle]

Hardly mutually exclusive. Given the distribution of wealth in the country, the "wealthy" do pay more than the rest of the country in an absolute sense, while still paying at effective rates that are lower than the middle class because of ready access to accountants and benefiting from the capital gains rate. If you have a millionaire paying 10% of his income in taxes, and a guy making $30,000 a year paying 25% of his income in taxes the millionaire still pays more, though of course his rate is lower and he can frankly afford the taxes much more trivially. It's that kind of phrasing without context that lets Republicans turn every argument about tax fairness into a propaganda point about class warfare.

And the absolute value is completely irrelevant. If you tax someone making 30k per year, every percentage point in that persons tax rate hurts more than 1% of the income of a person making 5 million a year because as income increases, the marginal value of the dollar drops. The really rich make so much money that they dont even know what to do with it anymore. It is beyond the capacity of their flesh-brain to comprehend. Even taxing them upward of 50% would not hurt them, and they still have ample incentive to do their think, because half of 5 million is still more than their flesh-brain can fathom.

[UnderAGreySky]

The biggest victory of the Republicans has been convincing ignorant people that taxes are marginal. "Bumping you into the next bracket" is a mistake I made understanding once when I was 22 (in my first job, when I was trying to understand how much gets taxed and why) and since then have never forgotten it.

[MarshalPurnell]

Hardly mutually exclusive. Given the distribution of wealth in the country, the "wealthy" do pay more than the rest of the country in an absolute sense, while still paying at effective rates that are lower than the middle class because of ready access to accountants and benefiting from the capital gains rate. If you have a millionaire paying 10% of his income in taxes, and a guy making $30,000 a year paying 25% of his income in taxes the millionaire still pays more, though of course his rate is lower and he can frankly afford the taxes much more trivially. It's that kind of phrasing without context that lets Republicans turn every argument about tax fairness into a propaganda point about class warfare.

And the absolute value is completely irrelevant. If you tax someone making 30k per year, every percentage point in that persons tax rate hurts more than 1% of the income of a person making 5 million a year because as income increases, the marginal value of the dollar drops. The really rich make so much money that they dont even know what to do with it anymore. It is beyond the capacity of their flesh-brain to comprehend. Even taxing them upward of 50% would not hurt them, and they still have ample incentive to do their think, because half of 5 million is still more than their flesh-brain can fathom.

The absolute value is not irrelevant in a thirty-second soundbite, on the lines of: "The millionaires President Obama wants to tax more already pay half of the income taxes collected by the IRS. Meanwhile nearly fifty percent of Americans pay no income tax at all. Stop soaking the job-creating wealthy, and resist the liberals' class warfare rhetoric."

As the overwhelming majority of Tea Party members are not even close to being in the top 10% of income earners, they evidently find such facile arguments compelling. It seems the issues involved in setting up a truly fair tax structure are beyond the attention span of the average American. They do know that every dollar in tax they pay is lost income, and thanks to stagnant wages feel the pinch of that ever more tightly. Ergo they hate taxes, sympathize with people "taxed more heavily" than they are, and are susceptible to reactionary demagoguery that promises easy solutions from a mythic past. It might be helpful to point out just how much of the nation's economic resources are controlled by the arbitrarily small percentage of the taxpayers whenever someone pulls that gambit though I suspect partisans will just disbelieve it since it contradicts their narrative of "the wealthy" being innovative, sober, hard-working small businessmen.