I’m looking for serious answers to understand the mentality. Please avoid the snark. I know it’s low hanging and tempting but I’m pretty sure most, if not all, of use here on Lemmy “get it”.

I just can’t get out of my head how absurd it is that we, in the U.S. anyway, put so much of the tax burden on working class folks instead of those most benefiting from our economic system.

It seems to me the standard deduction should be at least the median personal income (~$40k) if not the mean(~$60k) with progressive tax brackets adjusted to cover costs thereafter and possibly a supplemental wealth tax.

But I’m not an economist so trying to understand why I’m wildly wrong and this would be a terrible idea either from an economic perspective or from a political perspective.

  • scarabic@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    7 days ago

    Yeah I think we may only differ on degree, and yes some of my confusion about your post came from phrasing. There are still some phrasing points I’m struggling on.

    I think the logical thing is to have those who most benefit from the infrastructure our taxes pay for

    The poor benefit from roads, schools, firefighters, Medical/Medicaid, and utilities as much as anyone. But I think you had the super wealthy in mind. “Those who benefit from infrastructure” is an odd way to pinpoint the super wealthy.

    be the ones who contribute the most.

    This part is already true. Progressive tax brackets have them contributing the most as a proportion of pay, and far and away the most in absolute numbers.

    And those that are seeing the least benefit be exempt.

    The entire lower 50-60% of the economy is an extremely inclusive notion of “those who benefit the least.”

    Again, phrasing.

    • ccunning@lemmy.worldOP
      2·
      6 days ago

      I think the logical thing is to have those who most benefit from the infrastructure our taxes pay for

      The poor benefit from roads, schools, firefighters, Medical/Medicaid, and utilities as much as anyone. But I think you had the super wealthy in mind. “Those who benefit from infrastructure” is an odd way to pinpoint the super wealthy.

      Those who “most benefit” would be those who have been able to leverage the infrastructure and security provided to profit wildly. Not those who are just scraping by.

      I think we do agree on all but degree like you said. And maybe mean/median income is too high. I was just trying to come up with a somewhat natural but objective breaking point. I think a more reasonable but also more subjective one might be the “living wage” which will certainly be much lower than mean/median but also much higher than $13k.

      P.S. Tangentially related, I found this living wage calculator which put my current LCOL residence at ~$42k and my previous HCOL residence at ~$57k. Turned out to be much closer to Mean/median than I expected.