As are a lot of states, actually. Kevin Drum links to a ranking of the progressivity of states’ tax systems. We’re not very good.
Soaking the Poor, State by State | Mother Jones.
This is dumb. And wrong. As we know, in Massachusetts a progressive income tax is in fact prohibited by our constitution, although there may be some loopholes/workarounds to that.
A progressive income tax has been on the BMG agenda for years now. It would minimize the pain caused by revenue increases needed to stabilize the MBTA, for instance. In other words, a gas tax hike causes more actual quality-of-life-changing deprivation than would a slight progressive income tax tweak.
Conservatives frame progressive taxation as “punishing success” or “class warfare”. That’s silly, and a red herring, in that it proposes an “evil” intent behind the idea of progressive taxation — without actually demonstrating how it would be bad. Progressive taxation makes necessary public investments possible, while minimizing the actual human cost of raising the money. I strongly suspect that much anti-tax feeling among the non-rich is precisely the result of regressive taxation.
These public investments — infrastructure, education, health, justice — make broad-based prosperity possible, just as they also enable and make possible enormous private prosperity. If you’re going to get rich selling stuff, you need someone with the means to buy it.
We tax in a dumb way which causes more pain than it should. We should stop doing that.
while the effective federal tax rate on the wealthiest Americans has dropped by 2/3rds during the same period. (I don’t have the source in front of me, but can supply it if there’s interest.)
And it is very true that people who are not informed about the consequences of tax cuts for the rich have no clue that regressive taxes are increased to cover the cost of tax cuts for the top 1% and other tax rates and loopholes designed to benefit the wealthy. I have been doing my best to get that message out, and have informed plenty of people about it. Maybe it would be great if candidates who are running for office explained this fact so more people could be aware and fewer people would be voting against their own interests. I can’t believe how many people unintentionally vote against their own interests simply because they have no clue what is really going on. It’s so damn irritating. But the other part to this story is that we also have to elect candidates who are willing to take that courageous step forward and fight for the interests of not only the people who vote for them but the interest of majority of American when it comes to taxation. We’ve been having issues with that lately and it’s not helping with the cause, that’s for sure.
all of this applies. State and local taxes on low and middle income people keep going up. There is just no more money to give.
The US Constitution says
So why does that “uniform” allow a progressive structure but ours doesn’t? I think ours does, and it has been interpreted wrong. We could do it without changing the Constitution. If someone appeals and the SJC says we can’t, then appeal to the federal courts.
to the old gray mare, whom he had just accidentally banecapped.
But I digress.
At the moment we are more concerned to note that the authority of the Fedguv Congress, approval rating -17.76%, to lay taxes nonuniform (as between States) on the incomes of individual citizens, be they clean-limbed Corporate or merely icky-zoölogical, derives from Amendment XVI, “Sweet Sixteen,”
which overrides the passage Dr. Cuteless adduces.
“”Everybody knows that.”
Happy days.
is to restore the sales tax on alcohol, and add one on clothing. Somehow rich people get away with paying no taxes on some of their most luxurious extravagant purchases, like $100 bottles of wine and $1000 suits. If someone can afford the good stuff, they can afford to pay the taxes on it.
Sales of individual items of clothing costing $175 or less also generally are exempt. (Sales tax is due only on the amount over $175 per item.)
http://www.sec.state.ma.us/cis/ciswel/weltomas.htm
and there is already an excise tax on wine, I believe based not on the price but the liquid.
I don’t think the sale tax on liquor is coming back, I do hope some of the stores near the NH board do come back:(
It’s true that there is a very modest by-volume excise tax on wine (about 11 cents per bottle), as well as other alcoholic beverages. But that doesn’t mean that a sales tax on alcohol is a bad idea. The “double taxation” that would result is, if you really look at it, trivial.
That the “double taxation” is relatively trivial, though it isn’t nothing. Indeed, it raises the question why one particular product (alcohol) is singled out for different treatment than other consumer products. It doesn’t make much sense, like much of the tax code.
Alcohol causes problems, problems that require the expenditure of public dollars to address, so it gets a special tax treatment to help offset these costs. Like having to call out a legion of cops for every major sporting event. I don’t think this would be necessary without the deleterious effect of excess alcohol consumption on human behavior.
Do you also believe that tobacco is overtaxed?
Does this table speak to rates or effective taxation? Massachusetts’ rates are not progressive, but I thought the personal exemption and renter’s deduction helped make up for that to some extent for lower income taxpayers.
From the linked source:
The tax structure is effectively regressive because the poor spend a greater percentage of their income on sales taxes, vehicle fees, gas taxes, etc. besides the income tax.
But didn’t find this passage conclusive since it speaks to ‘tax rates’ –
When the federal constitution says something shall be uniform throughout the US it means that, for example, the same rates must apply to Massachusetts as to California, but not about the rate. The state constitution is more explicit to state, “but shall be levied at a uniform rate throughout the commonwealth upon incomes derived from the same class of property”. The key here is uniform RATE, so on wages for example the tax must be the same no matter the amount earned.
Not buying it, Christopher. How can there be a tax without a rate? Consider it this way: if there was a five percent flat tax rate in Suffolk County but a three percent flat tax rate in every other county, would you say that was Constitutional, because in every case the “rate” was flat? I wouldn’t.
I think “uniform” refers to “throughout the commonwealth” and the use of the word “rate” is redundant. The US Constitution would not be changed if it said: “but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform at a uniform rate throughout the United States.”
And, doesn’t that mean that state sales taxes and income taxes are now unconstitutional, the same way the Bill Of Rights now applies to the states, even though it originally just refered to Congress? I think we should get rid of non-uniform state taxes, they cause so many problems, like liquor stores going out of business near borders, people driving way too far to buy a television, etc. To get below 350 ppm and prevent environmental catastrophe, we need uniform taxes throughout the United States.
I don’t have numbers, but I suspect that charley doesn’t either.
What percent of the bottom 10% of families sorted by income pay significant gas tax in MA? I don’t actually know. Plenty pay close to zero, since they ride the bus. Plenty pay substantially more than zero. Of course, by rolling an increase in gas tax to public transit, it may help even more low income families transition from paying substantially more than zero in gas tax to something close to zero.
First you sound like you are saying states shouldn’t set their own rates on their own taxes and I completely disagree with that. Different states provide different services, have different resources, have different needs, etc.
The federal constitution is upheld as long as whatever rules put in place apply throughout. If the top bracket pays 35% in both MA and CA, but the lowest bracket pays 20% in both that is fine. What would not be fine is if the top bracket in MA were charged 39%, but the same income for a CA resident was charged, say 20%. The rates are different, but the RULES are the same. The MA constitution insists that the RATE is uniform for the same type of income. Your Suffolk vs. other counties analogy would not be constitutional by either the state or federal definition.
because it’d be flat in both places. You say that “uniform rate” means flat at all income levels. I say that’s not what uniform rate means, it means it must be the same everywhere.
I think that also should apply to states as well as counties within a state. We should replace state sales taxes with a federal sales tax. Eventually do the same with income and property taxes too. States aren’t countries, they shouldn’t compete with each other.
…you’ve gone against several years and cases worth of jurisprudence. The word “rate” is singular in the MA constitution, suggesting there can only be one and it must be the same (ie uniform). The federal constitution does not use the word rate, but uses the plural form of excises and duties. Don’t forget of course that the 16th amendment gives Congress carte blanche to tax income from any source derived and the original income tax ONLY applied to the very wealthy.
Then again, I’m now remembering that you have previously argued that nominating and ballot question petitions should count as one’s personal papers for the purposes of a search and that not everyone born in the US is a natural born citizen, so your record on constitutional interpretation leaves something to be desired to say the least. Sometimes I wonder if you suggest outlandish interpretations just to provoke a response in the manner of a troll.
in some cases yes and some cases no, but the fundamental problem is that there are too many people (47%) that pay no federal taxes because they don’t make enough money.
So the question is how does raising taxes on wealthier people help get people earning a living wage so they can pay taxes and contribute?
Taxing the wealthy at higher rates helps to get our wars paid for, starts to pay down national debt to China, provides funds for repairing our infrastructure, investments in public education, etc. Also, if paying themselves higher salaries while stiffing all their employees becomes a less rewarding proposition. perhaps they’ll think about hiring some more people or giving employees a raise. Maybe we can even start to attract a different sort to upper management- people who care about their companies and worry less about exorbitant sums of money, hookers, and golf.
I would imagine that if 70% of working americans paid taxes we would all be better off. Raising taxes doesn’t create incentive to hire more people and raise salaries.
Sure, that’s gonna happen, plus we’ll have unemployed hookers and golf course workers.
The fundamental problem in today’s US economy is that too much wealth is concentrated in the very wealthy, strangling everyone else and shutting off the “consumer” part of our consumer economy. There is more than enough wealth in the US today, that isn’t the problem.
The way that raising taxes on the very wealthy solves the problem is that it puts more wealth in the hands of the 99%. The 47% at the bottom end of the wealth distribution (I won’t quibble with your number for now) will immediately spend whatever increased wealth they receiving, pumping badly-needed cash back into the consumer economy. As that happens, more jobs will be created and more small businesses will thrive.
The premise of voluntary “trickle down” has been tried and has failed catastrophically. Forced “trickle down” — through direct or indirect wealth transfer — is a better approach. That’s why the US consumer economy has fared so much better during periods when government policy has blocked the excessive wealth concentration that we see today.
That is how “raising taxes on wealthier people help get people earning a living wage so they can pay taxes and contribute”.
How does raising taxes help in a fundamental way to redistribute wealth – especially for those that don’t pay taxes and won’t get any additional money to spend.
and built a railroad, and who has been living off ol’ greatgrampa’s money his whole life, messing around with movie starlets, drinking and driving, sailing around on a boat he did nothing to earn- you know, like a sterotypical rich layabout. You take that money, leaving junior enough to still afford his cocaine habit and a couple of sportscars, and you invest that money in a jobs training program in the inner city. You train some people, and they get some good jobs. Voila! Wealth-redistribution through the beauty of taxing the bullshit class.
The federal government is dismantling programs, goods, and services desperately needed by “those who don’t pay taxes”, so that the already-wealthy can maintain large hoards of wealth carefully structured to benefit only themselves.
When those hoards are taxed and the resulting proceeds put back into circulation, the rest of us — including the 47% that you seem to resent so much — are able to restart the consumer spending engine that the right wing has stalled with its relentless greed.
But I think you already know all this.
Not sure how you draw the conclusion that I resent anyone.
I thought we were discussing the redistribution of wealth and the best way to achieve it. I was trying to understand why you think raising taxes does this, but apparently that is not possible without falsely placing resentment and generalizing (farnkoff) anyone the has made a lot of money as worthless.
The main reason I stopped posting was my feeling that BMG had become an echo chamber where respectable discussion was not possible when there was a fervent disagreement of opinion.
Can we have a civil discussion without false accusations and generalizations?
You asked: “Not sure how you draw the conclusion that I resent anyone. ”
Perhaps I misinterpreted what you wrote, if so I apologize. Here are the portions of your comment I was reacting to:
and
I got the apparently false impression that you were expressing resentment that so many Americans pay no taxes, rather than seeing what a shameful embarrassment it is that so many of us live at or near the edge of poverty while we remain the wealthiest nation in human history. For that I sincerely apologize.
I think we are having a civil discussion about how to redistribute wealth. You asked, and I have attempted to explain, how raising taxes on the very wealthy is far more likely to accomplish this than, for example, continuing their unsustainably small share of the overall tax burden.
I do not join those who attack as worthless anyone who has made a lot of money. To the contrary, I hope to someday join their ranks. Instead, I chastise those who, having made (or inherited) a whole lot money, attempt to rationalize further plundering of the less fortunate. My own view is that I welcome the privilege of paying more taxes that comes with my own success if I am able to attain great wealth.
Meanwhile, I think it remains true that the fundamental problem with today’s US economy is that our enormous wealth is overly concentrated in the very wealthy, and that more aggressive taxation of the very wealthy is the only viable way to move that excessive wealth back into the consumer economy.
That is how we create the economic growth that in turn brings prosperity to those who are today in despair.
There is a great deal of money in the so-called “capital” economy right now. It is being used for speculation and for investments – lots of it overseas, since there is no reason to invest in our stagnant economy.
Raising the rates on this non-consumer income will either cause those people to lower their profits/salaries (perhaps by paying their employees more), or will transfer the money to the government, in which case the government can use it on services which are primarily used by the middle and lower classes.
I was thinking about this the other day – do you know why so many people buy SUVs in New England? Because the plowing sucks. So everyone spends an extra $10-20k on a car and tolerates cities plowing the streets 12-20 hours after the snow stops. It is likely that if each person paid another $500 in taxes (admittedly a made-up number), the streets could be kept pristine during a storm, thus saving people from having to spend $10-20k more on a vehicle.
Conservatives have convinced us that taxing “takes money out of the economy”. It doesn’t. It takes money out of *their* economy and puts it into our communities, providing us with the services that we need.
at what point people will stop spreading the falsehood that “47% pay no federal taxes.” This has been debunked so many times that ignorance is no longer an excuse. It is just willful misrepresentation at this point.
47% pay no federal income taxes…from CNN