Todd Sprang That's like saying the income tax encourages people not to make money: true, but not really. Besides, this encourages a higher velocity of money -- which is good.
Todd Sprang , Tony Lower-Basch -- in my headcannon, it is every expense. So, the formula of what's taxable is yearly income minus yearly expenses. Or, to put it another way, the increase in my wealth from one year to another.
The tax code does account for some expenses which one could classify as necessary but they are buried in schedule A. Medical expenses that exceed 10% of your AGI; real estate taxes; mortgage interest; personal property taxes; the greater of state taxes or sales taxes; charitable contributions; and so on.
The problem is these expenses must exceed your standard deduction to give you a benefit. It's unfortunate because unless you own a home, have medical expenses, a mortgage, and lots of charitable contributions, you're not getting anything out of those tax wise.
so let's say i make $50k. i spend $49k on whatever, so my "profit" is $1k, and i'm taxed in a smaller bracket because i've only got $1k at the end of the year. however, if i'm frugal and try to save my money, i spend only $40k, leaving $10k "profit". presumably i'm taxed in a higher bracket.
seems really plain that people would just go ahead and blow as much as possible to be in the lower bracket, no? it's not the same as making more gross. offer me a job at $25k and $250k, i'll take $250, tyvm. and at the end of the year, as long as i spend $249k, i'm in the same bracket as the schmuck who earned $25k and spent $24k.
Orion Cooper All of that is correct, and all of that is part of what bothers me so. A tax code that is too complicated for its citizens to understand is an overly complicated tax code. Same with laws.
Todd Sprang Yes: The frugal person in this situation still has more money with which to pay taxes. The person dying of credit card debt, whose profit was -10k, has no such ability to pay.
Yep, Orion Cooper . And none of this keeping receipts either. What was the average (maybe) of your wealth last year? What was it this year? Do some subtraction.
Orion Cooper At least for me, all my money is in banks and other organizations that report to the fed anyway. It'll be easy enough to have the IRS do a first pass -- which is a whole other arugment -- and give me a suggested bill that I can fight if I want to.
That is an idea that keeps getting killed in congress. The IRS wants to do automatic taxes where they calculate your tax liability for you based on reported documents. Funny enough, the tax preparation companies keep lobbying against it.
Orion Cooper Yep, I know. Killing a billion dollar industry that thrives due to unreadability of the tax code is ... hard. We've got a few industries like that, mostly made up of lawyers.
William Nichols : Having filled out taxes for a company (albeit a very small one), I'm not convinced that we do just take all their expenses and subtract them from all their income. There's columns and categories and all manner of jiggery-pokery, and some of it actually seems related to not giving tax write-offs when companies (for instance) buy their CEO a yacht and claim it as an expense. That's why I was initially asking "How do I tell which expenses are deductible?" ... precisely because I was comparing with doing corporate taxes.
That's a valid point, Tony Lower-Basch . When I did my own corporate taxes last year, I ... smudged it a lot? Something like that. I ignored a lot of the jiggery pokery, because it wasn't worth doing perfectly.
But, you're right: that shit is complicated. In my ideal world, it isn't, either.
The thing is, I sympathize with the goal behind the complexity.
I think that a person (or company) with 250K of income that spends $249K of it, likely has more responsibility to pay taxes than a person (or company) with $18K of income that spends $17K of it just keeping their head above water.
If the first wants to convince me that every single dollar of that $249K was as necessary to their survival as the same dollar spent by the second person ... let me suggest that that is an extraordinary claim that would merit extraordinary proof.
But 'Churn' of money creates 'economic stimulus' which is good for the overall economy, so the more you spend the more you stimulate the economy and help create growth.... and when you borrow money and spend it that's money you are borrowing that is otherwise idle, which is considered bad for the economy (being idle).
So, because of the way the American economy is, as long as you are paying back into the system by paying the interest due on loans you are helping building economic growth and in combination with spending what you earn you help growth. Miserly behavior is bad for a capitalistic economic system, it only thrives on churn.
If you want savings, then you need a Socialistic Democracy, one that looks to the future beyond the latest economic quarterly statement about how much churn is on the books and saves a percentage of resources and funding for future needs and generations while not stripping away the money for survival for a percentage of the population the way ecomomic churn does.
You are slotted X dollars to live based on a calculation of you and your dependents. If your income is higher than that you are taxed a flat Y% on the difference. If your income is lower than that you are provided a payment to bring you to that level.
Boom done.
No need for seperate unemployment, welfare, or social security and no social engineering.
Simple, manageable, solves a vast number of issues.
Taxing anything other than income is a non starter. It is ridiculously complex to track expenses properly and tracking expenses simply is just an invitation to such rampant tax fraud as you might as well not tax at all.
Encouraging saving is a good thing. Encouraging spending is playing with fire of the sort that leads to massive economic recessions.
You could try to skip to the end and track net worth. But that only seems like a simple solution when one doesn't have much net worth to track. Here's an easy example.
What is the value you ascribe to: $10,000,000 in cash, a $10,000,000 yacht, a $10,000,000 personal residence, and a $10,000,000 business. Because the answer is only $10,000,000 for the cash (and marketable securities).
The estate tax law is an attempt to tax net worth (i.e. lifetime accumulated profit) and it is as complicated and convoluted as the income tax law.
So yes, basic income is still based on income. But here's why it gets you to the same place as your "profitability" notion: the basic income is the allotted level of legitimate expenses you're allowed to deduct. Every dollar above that is treated as profit. Any expenses you have above that are simply non deductible expenses. Done.
Ralph Mazza You say that as if the two are the only options. While these are the only two we've discussed here, it is a false equivalence to suggest it is either income tax or the suggestion I initially put forward.
I know what economist who wants to tax land. A year ago, he said land and only land. He has relented in that, but does still think taxing land is a good way to go.
Land Tax aka Georgism after the economist who initially promoted it has its own vast set of problems. Not the least of which is its inherently regressive i.e. the burden falls heavier on the lower classes and less on the upper.
This is because land value varies, but it varies less then the value of the buildings on the land. Which means taxing the land (and not the buildings, the essential difference between a Land Tax and a Property Tax) leaves less of difference between a middle end property and a high end property than taxing the land and the buildings. And since, like any tax, the burden will be passed on to end users, the net result of a land will be to raise residential and commercial rents. Both of which tend to fall more heavily on the poor.
It also leads to either exploitation (as land owners seek new ways of making the land "productive" to pay the tax) or abandonment as landowners simply walk away. Pittsburgh was mired in economic doldrums for years as a result of its municipal land tax
In the end...a land tax is just an indirect way of taxing income anyway, as the inherent value of land lies in the income producing use to which it is put. But because its an indirect income tax it becomes even easier for the ultimate recipients of the income to dodge the tax.
Maybe you can help me out. You started off by saying you wanted personal taxes to be based on profitability, which is inherently untenable since individuals don't have a board of directors and shareholders requiring them to control expenses and maximize profit.
I demonstrated that a Basic Guaranteed Income tax was about the closest thing you could get to a "profitability" tax for individuals, but then you brought up Land Tax...which is about as close to being the exact opposite of a profitability tax as you can get.
So at this point I'm rather lost. I gather you have some sort of bugaboo about "income" as the measuring stick for taxes, but I'm not sure why that is.
If your OP wasnt just idle musing perhaps you could start over with what you're really looking for.
Ralph Mazza The suggestion a few posts ago was that there are a variety of possible ways to do taxation, not simply one or two. A variety of broad categories, even. That was when land was brought up -- not as a specific suggestion, but (I thought obviously, though apparently not) as an example case of taxation that is incredibly different from previous measuring sticks.
I also would suggest that you didn't "demonstrate" much of anything about a BGI, and that you missed the comparison that having a guaranteed basic income is inherently spending, and can be decoupled from taxation. I've seen a couple posters attempt to inform you of that, and you either ignored it, didn't care, or didn't understand that that was the point.
Lastly, a single line post is not meant as a policy statement. Rather, closer to a thought experiment to consider where it would go. I strive for a rather free wheeling conversation circle. Which includes, at least in real life, PhD'd economists. What I don't need -- and pardon the directness -- is to be talked down to on the effects of taxation.
You're welcome to stay and participate. But, I do need you to not talk down to anyone -- least of all me. :-)
Not sure what you're referring to. I made my simple tax post. Orion pointed out that was a Basic Income proposal. I agreed. And every single post after that is the exchange between you and I. So whatever comparison you've seen a couple posters make, I haven't seen them...cuz there are no such comments in my view of this thread.
You started this thread with the idea that you preferred a profitability based income tax. Somehow that has now morphed to general musings about lots of different ways to calculate taxes. Maybe that's what you mean by free wheeling...seems like moving the goal posts to me.
In any event I think I did a pretty solid, if succinct, job of explaining how a Basic Guaranteed Income is the closest way one can come to approximating a profitability based tax...which is what you originally said you wanted.
If that wasn't clear, I'll try again.
Income minus deductible expenses = taxable income. This would be nightmarish to actually calculate and heavily prone to abuse.
Under a Guaranteed Basic Income approach: Income - GBI = taxable income.
GBI here is serving as a statutory proxy for deductible expenses, which also serves your stated purpose of not having to track receipts. It doesn't capture everything you likely envisioned as being an expense, but it is manageable and not easy to abuse. Hence, closest you're likely to get to a profitability based tax that's actually implementable.
Ralph Mazza By referencing the moving of goalposts, it sounds like you think this is a debate. It isn't, and never has been. There's nothing to defend, and there's no game. This is a discussion, not an argument. The continued suggested that what I mean isn't what I mean is, though, bothersome.
In any event, this thread has long sense served its purpose. I'm going to shut down comments. Feel free to follow up in any of the ways to continue to have a conversation.
No matter how you do it there will be horrible tax games that people play jumping through loopholes.
ReplyDeletewouldn't that incline people to spend everything they can? "hey look, no profits!"
ReplyDeleteAdmittedly true. Honestly, I'm less concerned with finding every dollar than with having laws that are understandable.
ReplyDeleteTodd Sprang That's like saying the income tax encourages people not to make money: true, but not really. Besides, this encourages a higher velocity of money -- which is good.
ReplyDeleteBusiness taxes are based on profitability. So is self employment and independent contracting.
ReplyDeleteYep, Orion Cooper . Any idea why personal taxes aren't?
ReplyDeleteFuck the poor?
ReplyDeleteThere are some pretty good arguments that we should encourage people to buy less on credit and more with cash... and this idea would not do that.
ReplyDeletei guess i don't know what you mean by profitability when applied to an individual.
ReplyDeleteYeah, what Todd said. I'm not clear which of my expenses are necessary to the smooth functioning of my brand, vs. which are something else.
ReplyDeleteTodd Sprang , Tony Lower-Basch -- in my headcannon, it is every expense. So, the formula of what's taxable is yearly income minus yearly expenses. Or, to put it another way, the increase in my wealth from one year to another.
ReplyDeleteAlso, Todd Sprang and Tony Lower-Basch ? Recommend you two get to know each other: You both like RPGs, both live locally, and are both adults.
ReplyDeleteThe tax code does account for some expenses which one could classify as necessary but they are buried in schedule A. Medical expenses that exceed 10% of your AGI; real estate taxes; mortgage interest; personal property taxes; the greater of state taxes or sales taxes; charitable contributions; and so on.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is these expenses must exceed your standard deduction to give you a benefit. It's unfortunate because unless you own a home, have medical expenses, a mortgage, and lots of charitable contributions, you're not getting anything out of those tax wise.
i'm no adult. pff.
ReplyDeleteso let's say i make $50k. i spend $49k on whatever, so my "profit" is $1k, and i'm taxed in a smaller bracket because i've only got $1k at the end of the year. however, if i'm frugal and try to save my money, i spend only $40k, leaving $10k "profit". presumably i'm taxed in a higher bracket.
seems really plain that people would just go ahead and blow as much as possible to be in the lower bracket, no? it's not the same as making more gross. offer me a job at $25k and $250k, i'll take $250, tyvm. and at the end of the year, as long as i spend $249k, i'm in the same bracket as the schmuck who earned $25k and spent $24k.
am i missing something?
Orion Cooper All of that is correct, and all of that is part of what bothers me so. A tax code that is too complicated for its citizens to understand is an overly complicated tax code. Same with laws.
ReplyDeleteTodd Sprang Yes: The frugal person in this situation still has more money with which to pay taxes. The person dying of credit card debt, whose profit was -10k, has no such ability to pay.
"From each according to their ability, to each according to their desires"?
ReplyDeleteIts what we do for companies, Tony Lower-Basch
ReplyDeleteSo instead of a standard deduction or itemized seduction, you want a direct write off of expenses? Living expenses?
ReplyDeleteYep, Orion Cooper . And none of this keeping receipts either. What was the average (maybe) of your wealth last year? What was it this year? Do some subtraction.
ReplyDeleteThere is a lot of good faith involved in taxation. I think you're asking for a bit too much.
ReplyDeleteOrion Cooper At least for me, all my money is in banks and other organizations that report to the fed anyway. It'll be easy enough to have the IRS do a first pass -- which is a whole other arugment -- and give me a suggested bill that I can fight if I want to.
ReplyDeleteThat is an idea that keeps getting killed in congress. The IRS wants to do automatic taxes where they calculate your tax liability for you based on reported documents. Funny enough, the tax preparation companies keep lobbying against it.
ReplyDeleteOrion Cooper Yep, I know. Killing a billion dollar industry that thrives due to unreadability of the tax code is ... hard. We've got a few industries like that, mostly made up of lawyers.
ReplyDeleteOrion Cooper: Man, I totally want to see the form for "itemized seduction."
ReplyDeleteWilliam Nichols : Having filled out taxes for a company (albeit a very small one), I'm not convinced that we do just take all their expenses and subtract them from all their income. There's columns and categories and all manner of jiggery-pokery, and some of it actually seems related to not giving tax write-offs when companies (for instance) buy their CEO a yacht and claim it as an expense. That's why I was initially asking "How do I tell which expenses are deductible?" ... precisely because I was comparing with doing corporate taxes.
ReplyDeleteThat's a valid point, Tony Lower-Basch . When I did my own corporate taxes last year, I ... smudged it a lot? Something like that. I ignored a lot of the jiggery pokery, because it wasn't worth doing perfectly.
ReplyDeleteBut, you're right: that shit is complicated. In my ideal world, it isn't, either.
The thing is, I sympathize with the goal behind the complexity.
ReplyDeleteI think that a person (or company) with 250K of income that spends $249K of it, likely has more responsibility to pay taxes than a person (or company) with $18K of income that spends $17K of it just keeping their head above water.
If the first wants to convince me that every single dollar of that $249K was as necessary to their survival as the same dollar spent by the second person ... let me suggest that that is an extraordinary claim that would merit extraordinary proof.
But 'Churn' of money creates 'economic stimulus' which is good for the overall economy, so the more you spend the more you stimulate the economy and help create growth.... and when you borrow money and spend it that's money you are borrowing that is otherwise idle, which is considered bad for the economy (being idle).
ReplyDeleteSo, because of the way the American economy is, as long as you are paying back into the system by paying the interest due on loans you are helping building economic growth and in combination with spending what you earn you help growth. Miserly behavior is bad for a capitalistic economic system, it only thrives on churn.
If you want savings, then you need a Socialistic Democracy, one that looks to the future beyond the latest economic quarterly statement about how much churn is on the books and saves a percentage of resources and funding for future needs and generations while not stripping away the money for survival for a percentage of the population the way ecomomic churn does.
Simple tax:
ReplyDeleteYou are slotted X dollars to live based on a calculation of you and your dependents. If your income is higher than that you are taxed a flat Y% on the difference. If your income is lower than that you are provided a payment to bring you to that level.
Boom done.
No need for seperate unemployment, welfare, or social security and no social engineering.
Simple, manageable, solves a vast number of issues.
Ralph Mazza see basic income.
ReplyDeleteYep.
ReplyDeleteI'd wager everyone here knows the idea of a basic income. Most depictions still have you taxing income.
ReplyDeleteBasic income: Yes.
Income Tax: Let's find something else.
Taxing anything other than income is a non starter. It is ridiculously complex to track expenses properly and tracking expenses simply is just an invitation to such rampant tax fraud as you might as well not tax at all.
ReplyDeleteEncouraging saving is a good thing. Encouraging spending is playing with fire of the sort that leads to massive economic recessions.
You could try to skip to the end and track net worth. But that only seems like a simple solution when one doesn't have much net worth to track. Here's an easy example.
What is the value you ascribe to: $10,000,000 in cash, a $10,000,000 yacht, a $10,000,000 personal residence, and a $10,000,000 business. Because the answer is only $10,000,000 for the cash (and marketable securities).
The estate tax law is an attempt to tax net worth (i.e. lifetime accumulated profit) and it is as complicated and convoluted as the income tax law.
So yes, basic income is still based on income. But here's why it gets you to the same place as your "profitability" notion: the basic income is the allotted level of legitimate expenses you're allowed to deduct. Every dollar above that is treated as profit. Any expenses you have above that are simply non deductible expenses. Done.
Ralph Mazza You say that as if the two are the only options. While these are the only two we've discussed here, it is a false equivalence to suggest it is either income tax or the suggestion I initially put forward.
ReplyDeleteI know what economist who wants to tax land. A year ago, he said land and only land. He has relented in that, but does still think taxing land is a good way to go.
Land Tax aka Georgism after the economist who initially promoted it has its own vast set of problems. Not the least of which is its inherently regressive i.e. the burden falls heavier on the lower classes and less on the upper.
ReplyDeleteThis is because land value varies, but it varies less then the value of the buildings on the land. Which means taxing the land (and not the buildings, the essential difference between a Land Tax and a Property Tax) leaves less of difference between a middle end property and a high end property than taxing the land and the buildings. And since, like any tax, the burden will be passed on to end users, the net result of a land will be to raise residential and commercial rents. Both of which tend to fall more heavily on the poor.
It also leads to either exploitation (as land owners seek new ways of making the land "productive" to pay the tax) or abandonment as landowners simply walk away. Pittsburgh was mired in economic doldrums for years as a result of its municipal land tax
In the end...a land tax is just an indirect way of taxing income anyway, as the inherent value of land lies in the income producing use to which it is put. But because its an indirect income tax it becomes even easier for the ultimate recipients of the income to dodge the tax.
Ralph Mazza I think you may have missed my broader point, for the trees. Think about my previous post a second again.
ReplyDeleteMaybe you can help me out. You started off by saying you wanted personal taxes to be based on profitability, which is inherently untenable since individuals don't have a board of directors and shareholders requiring them to control expenses and maximize profit.
ReplyDeleteI demonstrated that a Basic Guaranteed Income tax was about the closest thing you could get to a "profitability" tax for individuals, but then you brought up Land Tax...which is about as close to being the exact opposite of a profitability tax as you can get.
So at this point I'm rather lost. I gather you have some sort of bugaboo about "income" as the measuring stick for taxes, but I'm not sure why that is.
If your OP wasnt just idle musing perhaps you could start over with what you're really looking for.
Ralph Mazza The suggestion a few posts ago was that there are a variety of possible ways to do taxation, not simply one or two. A variety of broad categories, even. That was when land was brought up -- not as a specific suggestion, but (I thought obviously, though apparently not) as an example case of taxation that is incredibly different from previous measuring sticks.
ReplyDeleteI also would suggest that you didn't "demonstrate" much of anything about a BGI, and that you missed the comparison that having a guaranteed basic income is inherently spending, and can be decoupled from taxation. I've seen a couple posters attempt to inform you of that, and you either ignored it, didn't care, or didn't understand that that was the point.
Lastly, a single line post is not meant as a policy statement. Rather, closer to a thought experiment to consider where it would go. I strive for a rather free wheeling conversation circle. Which includes, at least in real life, PhD'd economists. What I don't need -- and pardon the directness -- is to be talked down to on the effects of taxation.
You're welcome to stay and participate. But, I do need you to not talk down to anyone -- least of all me. :-)
Not sure what you're referring to. I made my simple tax post. Orion pointed out that was a Basic Income proposal. I agreed. And every single post after that is the exchange between you and I. So whatever comparison you've seen a couple posters make, I haven't seen them...cuz there are no such comments in my view of this thread.
ReplyDeleteYou started this thread with the idea that you preferred a profitability based income tax. Somehow that has now morphed to general musings about lots of different ways to calculate taxes. Maybe that's what you mean by free wheeling...seems like moving the goal posts to me.
In any event I think I did a pretty solid, if succinct, job of explaining how a Basic Guaranteed Income is the closest way one can come to approximating a profitability based tax...which is what you originally said you wanted.
If that wasn't clear, I'll try again.
Income minus deductible expenses = taxable income.
This would be nightmarish to actually calculate and heavily prone to abuse.
Under a Guaranteed Basic Income approach:
Income - GBI = taxable income.
GBI here is serving as a statutory proxy for deductible expenses, which also serves your stated purpose of not having to track receipts. It doesn't capture everything you likely envisioned as being an expense, but it is manageable and not easy to abuse. Hence, closest you're likely to get to a profitability based tax that's actually implementable.
Ralph Mazza By referencing the moving of goalposts, it sounds like you think this is a debate. It isn't, and never has been. There's nothing to defend, and there's no game. This is a discussion, not an argument. The continued suggested that what I mean isn't what I mean is, though, bothersome.
ReplyDeleteIn any event, this thread has long sense served its purpose. I'm going to shut down comments. Feel free to follow up in any of the ways to continue to have a conversation.