Carlin created some fabulous sketches and sometimes provided amazing insights, but he also super biased and ended up being wrong about many things. The people who elect the most selfish, most ignorant leaders are, to a large extent, the most well-intentioned, emphatic people who really hope that socialist policies will improve the world.
Shockingly stupid comment - what gets published as "opinion" article has NOTHING to do with its quality and truth content, it ONLY means that the editor wants to distance himself from the content when he expects that there will be a lot of political opposition from the liars who don't want their lies to be exposed.
The corporate tax rate should be zero. Corporate profits (or revenues) should only be taxed when are transferred to individuals, because that's when the profits become income.
@@bobtuiliga8691 I wonder what unions and so-called pro labor groups would say if profits were taxed before taking out labor costs. I'll bet they would scream bloody murder!
The current system incentives taking high financial risks since interest payments are 100% tax deductible but retained earnings are taxes at a stupidly high rate, no wonder all interest rate increases are devastating to business when having a financial buffer is punished by the tax code...
@@---...---...---...---... I'm not an accountant, but I assume retained earnings are profits that sit in a company's bank account without being assigned to any specific person as income. I'm not sure how that should be treated tax-wise. For a privately-owned company, that money is effectively the owners', so it should be probably be treated as income for those owners. However, what if a company is just saving it for future investment, for example a large capital purchase to expand the business. That doesn't seem like it should be taxed at all, but how can the IRS predict how the funds will be used in the future?
Chinese and Vietnamese economists seems to understand it better than Western ones. Also nothing screams about understanding economy better than global crisis every decade or so
@AtticusKarpenter LOL uh-huh, tell me more about the collapse of the Soviet Union, Perestroika, and the CCCP taking measures to become more capitalistic to draw in Western businesses. Tell me you've never been to a Communist country without saying you've never been to a Communist country LOL
@@AtticusKarpenter You mean the boom and bust cycle Hayek is famous for advocating against? You basically just proved Hayek right in real time. Probably the worst own-goal I've ever seen on the internet.
Personally, I don't get the whole comparing percentages thing. If I pay 24% on $100,000 that's still a whole lot less actual dollars than 23% on $1,000,000.
It's because some people think people shouldn't have more wealth than they 'need'. Progressive tax structure is inherently unfair with the only fair tax being a flat tax.
Taxation, to the narrow extent it is legitimate, should be used only to fund explicitly Constitutional programs. Not one penny should be used for any other purpose. The tax system should not be used to influence human behavior, either in the form of incentives or disincentives. No group of persons should be singled out for special tax treatment, either to their benefit or their detriment. Every adult should have to have skin in the game, otherwise we are stuck with the system as it currently is, with a very large portion of the populace paying no taxes, yet able to vote for the people who will tax others.
Correction, there - a very large portion of the populace doesn't KNOW that they are paying taxes - much less how much they are paying. Even if you happen to be in one of the few places that doesn't have a sales tax, you are still paying property tax on your apartment, the property tax on the places where you buy things, the business taxes and fees on those same places, the personal taxes on the owners (so that they have money left over from their profits to buy things), etc. All hidden from you - even if you TRY to figure out how much you're actually paying, you just can't.
What I find misleading is the language "..share of America's wealth". What a joke that is. America has no wealth. Americans create wealth through invention and labor. That wealth belongs ENTIRELY to the people who produce it... not to consumers, not to the government (except for government services... and apportioned to their value, which is often precious little when you factor in all the red tape and waste). Also, 'share' suggests a zero sum game, where the wealth in the country is limited, and so if the super rich have a lot, they've somehow taken it from the rest of us. Huge corporations GROW the economy, and they don't take anything, they sell. The super rich are the people driving gigantic corporations that earn 100s of billions by selling expensive products and services to 100s of millions. It's entirely a matter of scale. Apple stock, for example, is 16 BILLION shares of $164 per share. That's a 2.6 trillion dollar "market capitalization,"..basically the value of the company. In return for those earnings, 100s of millions of us have iPhones, iPad, awesome computers, etc. And we all traded honestly with Apple for these incredible products and services. Economists like Zucman and Piketty not only want the awesome products created for "the people," but they want to take back the earnings of Apple et al. and give those to "the people" as well. They're just thieves and parasites.
I would argue that every country *_does_* have wealth, and *_one unit_* (dollar, etc.) of each country's respective currency is *_one share_* of that country's respective wealth.
@@aliendroneservices6621 the number of shares is not static - it goes up and down over time - due to inflation and to economic activity. Also the main point of the OP is that the rich are essential to the economy not detrimental.
Ofc my man, Musk, Bezos and such dudes are such godsent geniuses so they make hundreds of bucks every second from their corporate shares, even in their sleep. Anyone who thinks that this is not how system should work are thieves, parasites and communists, of course but when crisis blow, government pour trillions of people's tax money into saving those corporations. American army fight to protect interests of America's fruit corporations in South America or oil corporations in Middle East. Almost all states give huge preferences and tax cuts to corporations. But when question about giving something extra instead of taking, here capitalism comes in full swing and corpos not owe nothing to anyone. Hilarious. Somehow Huawei creates amazing smartphones (that since last year surpassed Apple in sophistication) without having a burden of super-rich owners, its state owned. Not to mention corporations not only create ideas, but also destroy them, by buying out and closing start-ups with ideas that are bad for money making (like concept of smartphone from blocks that can be disassembled so owner can buy and upgrade blocks one by one - only camera, for example, or only battery. That start up was buyed and buried, because corpos want you to buy whole smartphone each time, to give them more money) So, in conclusion, you are really bad at understanding both economy and corporations, and clearly live in some simplified utopian capitalist world how it was seen in 1900s
There really is no way to figure “personal income taxes” for every individual to use as a comparison. My wife is a partner in a Limited Liability Company. The company’s income taxes are a combination of the company and the three partners. That’s three families’ “personal income tax” that can’t be separated in a way that matches say, the director of a hospital or a senator or a restaurant manager.
Roughly 31.4% of income earners in the US did not have a Federal Income Tax liability in 2022 (per IRS). Per the National Taxpayer Union Foundation, the bottom 50% of wage earners shouldered 3% of the total income taxes while the top 1% paid 40% of the total Federal Income taxes.
The whole video is about how the chart was manipulated to deflate the billionaires' effective tax rate, and here I am still shocked by the fact that they removed the earned income tax credit in their calculation of the effective tax rate paid by the bottom half of income earners. That's insane! Being a refundable credit, the earned income tax credit reduces the effective tax rates for almost half of income earners to less than 0%: meaning they don't pay the government taxes, the government pays them! That's the most outrageous manipulation of this chart! Not the corporate tax thing!
If I make $50k and year go and spend $200 dollars on groceries and someone making $1,000,000 a year goes and buys the exact same cart full of food they won't spend as large a percent of their income as I will. That's called arithmetic or math. That's Maths for you Europeans. It doesn't mean we should punish them for their success. We should ask them how the built that income and emulate them instead of wallow in jealousy.
If you keep on with that line of reasoning, you are definitely not going to be invited to any Democrat party gatherings or meetings. You will be persona non grata with Pocahontas and company 😊
@@reality9451 that's socialism, and the million dollar earners normally will take the hundreds of jobs they had created and relocate to a nearby democracy where they are not punished for their success
LOL You really can't understand that amount of product (and money, because if there is much more money than product then inflation will even this out) in economy is always finite, so everyone can't be rich, so any rich person become such at expense of someone not becoming rich (or even more people not becoming middle class instead of poor)? And yes, if they are magically compelled to answer truthfully to your question, they would admit that they cheated, lied and killed their way to success, but i guess you would like to emulate that. I swear, this comment section is last asylum for naive believers in classical monetarist capitalism right from the times of Netherlands Bourgeois Revolution against Spanish occupation. Love how your knee-jerk reaction is always "you jealous of them!11" while normal people clearly state that they don't want to be rich, because (especially with greater transparency thx to age of social media) rich people on average not happier than middle class people. Its you are who want to be rich, so you offended on their behalf even though you are not rich yourself, so its you who are jealous of them
Where did they get this idea that people in the bottom half of earners pay upwards of 20% of their income in taxes? I have often seen it shown that the bottom half of Americans have a zero or negative effective tax rate. My effective tax rate was NEGATIVE 19% last year. I am married with four children, last year I made $42k and thanks to the Earned Income Credit and Child Tax Credit my refund was $8000 MORE than I paid in. Hence, negative 19%. I've had years where my effective rate was negative 50%. Even without dependents any individual or household making the average income or less is in the 12% tax bracket BEFORE making the standard deduction. I suppose if they include things like sales taxes on common purchases, DMV and other government fees, and property taxes (even if they are renters) they could push the number up that high. But none of those are imposed at the Federal level and unless they also factored that into what the rich pay it's not a fair comparison.
I can personally guarantee that the bottom half of earners do NOT pay 24% federal tax on their income. Bottom half of earners end up going closer to 8%.
I'm curious: what is the breakdown of donation to 501(c)3 organizations as a percentage of income between high earners and low? Just because people aren't "donating" to the federal government doesn't mean they aren't affecting society in other ways.
If the government really wanted to tax people equally or at least proportionally, get rid of the income tax and institute a national sales tax. Rich people don't get salaries or a lot of other forms of wages. Stock options, loans and dividends do not get taxed like wage and salary income. A national sales tax would be fairer in that the rich could not skate paying it, like they can with income.
Not really. A sales tax only would massively benefit the rich since the proportion of their income that they spend (and would be subject to taxation) is far lower than for the poor. Poor people have no choice but to spend a high amount of their earnings on basic things like food
@@nh1776 Look into the Fair Tax. It gives a rebate (called a prebate) to offset the cost of taxes up to the poverty spending threshold, so the poor still wouldn't pay taxes.
I love the left man. Its like watching penguins protest in favor of melting the ice caps. They don't really understand what they're doing but they sure are passionate about it.
I'm one of the higher income earners in the US -- I think I'm in the top 5-10% of households. My effective tax rate is 25% Most people are taxed WAY less than that, so I don't even believe the bottom half of Zuckman's chart.
It is amazing to me that we're still debating corporate taxation. Businesses don't pay taxes any more than they pay salaries, rent, overhead or any other expense. We pay their bills as consumers of their products or services. Without our dollars they don't exist. Only individuals, the end users, pay taxes. In other words, taxes are just as much the cost of doing business, passed along to the consumer as anything else a business does to keep its doors open. Taxing corporations is a tax on ourselves.
Let's pretend for a second here that the corporate tax burden is solely owned by the "rich". You can't just ignore the fact that they also have to pay capital gains tax too in this equation. It is essentially a tax on the corporate tax.
I love discovering the details of how academics achieve their desired results. Buried assumptions often lead to policy decisions, especially in the environmental sciences areas of my expertise.
Do any of you know what happens to your mandatory Medicare premium (for Part B) when you make money after age 65? How about when you take money out of your IRA. Let's say you take out 60,000 from your IRA to make a major purchase, such as home upgrade or buy a SUV. Guess what happens to the Medicare premium. UP. *A LOT.*
So imagine what happens to a high income earner taking out 120,000 per year in retirement. Answer, he pays much, MUCH more for Medicare, even though he likely paid FAR more into FICA taxes. Did they count THAT? There are many, many lower income breaks like that. Tons.
Companies don't pay taxes. The consumers who use the business are who pay all the taxes. The company is still going to price things in such a way that their take home profit at the end of the year is the same. If you raise their taxes, they just raise prices to match.
You'd really expect those numbers to be relatively stable, because tax avoidance works both ways. If taxes are too high, people will stop doing things that are taxed heavily. If taxes are lowered, people do more things that are taxed. And that's because people want to spend their money, so they'll increase their economic activity until they find the taxes prohibitive.
When claims are supported only by percentages ... BEWARE! Trickery and lies are afoot! BTW ... when you paid your taxes ... income tax, sales tax, FICA tax, any tax ... did you pay with percentages? I did not. I was forced to pay with dollars. I've looked high and low ... but every bill and every coin I've ever seen was denominated in those pesky DOLLARS. Never in percentages.
The problem is not that they dont pay enough Taxes. the problems is they have too many loopholes to avoid paying taxes. there are over 9000 tax laws at this point. Its time to Scrap the Whole Tax code in its entirety and start over from scratch and implement a MUCH easier to understand Tax Law without all the loopholes that forgives the working man and gets its money from Sales tax and capital gains tax and only Taxes income for people who make over 1 million per year in salaries!
Can someone look at the people living in the area that got power after the TVA was established and Jim Crowe share croppers in the south and really tell me wealth inequality is worse today? If I had to pick a country to be poor in, this one is pretty damn good.
Yes, the corporate income taxe is a form of double taxation on investment combined with the capital gains taxe, that's what we libertarian always explain when the left states that the capital gains rate is lower than the rate paid by workers on wages, I don't understand why now you would oppose allocating the burden of the corporate income taxe to the shareholders.
If you want your research and books to get results which lead to a good career, fame, and money, then you do whatever it takes to retell the narrative. Even if you do a pretty bad job of it, you do better than telling the truth.
This guy’s explanation for everything is so ambiguous. What’s the name of this channel again? You ask how they massage the numbers, and he just says that they look at the data differently or that they change one little thing. No specific details or examples. Pointless video for someone trying to discern truth. Lots of rhetoric for those who passionately disagree or agree though..
I might be wrong, but acording to my understanding the problem isnt that the law doesnt tax them enough - the problem is that the rich can walk around the law ('legally') to dodge the tax they need to pay. Something that some of the rich people are doing: Most of the money they have is as company shares and not in the bank - they would get taxed if they sell it. So instead of selling it, they are taking bug loans with very low intrest rate (intrest rate is low because the risk for the bank is low - worst case the person would have to sell their shares to pay it back) → those loans are not being taxed (or taxed for lower rates) → and how they return the loan you might ask? by taking anther loan from a diffrent lender! this way they can dodge taxes in a way the avrage person cant. It doesnt matter that in the law they are taxed the same rates as the avrage person - when they can dodge it. (i dont excuse Zucman for faking data, but maybe there is something in the way he wants to look at shares)
If it is legal - you aren't "walking around the law" - by definition! But that is the problem. So long as politicians write the tax law, they are going to write it to benefit their friends and campaign donors. It changes only when the politicians change who is in a position to write it (and this is a bipartisan thing - probably the most bipartisan thing - because a particular change can benefit the cronies of BOTH parties, it just depends on how many it benefits).
If they really wanted to change taxing to be more fair they should do it by taxing the change in net worth and total consumption each year not income. People like Warren Buffett have a very low income but their net worth can jump huge amounts if the stock prices go up. None of that increase is considered income until you sell the stock which he never does. Where as people who had their homes wiped out in Floods or fires will have a huge loss in net worth but still have a high tax burden due to significant incomes. They cannot deduct the loss where a business can. Many things in the tax code are not fair.
I am a fiscal conservative. However I don't understand why we don't tax inheritance more. Taxing productive individuals and corporations is counterproductive. But taxing lucky, unproductive heirs to inheritance makes a lot of sense compared to taking productive entities.
Communism much? So when you spend your life building up something, you don't get to do what you want with your own money? And if you want to build a mile long volleyball court with your own money, if the Arbiter of Productivity deems it not to be in the socialist common interest, it's disallowed? Communist much?
Aside from them just being evil, inheritance taxes don't really generate much revenue. If the estate is large enough to be _worth_ taxing, then avoiding that tax is triflingly simple.
@@robertmartin6800 Evil? You just tax the heir an normal income tax the same you tax other income? It wouldn't serve as a revenue generator. It would offset taxes paid by everyone else.
This sounds like boot licking. Any wealthy person I know pays net taxes at less than lower income people, plus, they write off cars, dinners, vacations and all sorts of stuff
Billionaires pay more taxes in one year than a nurse earns in 300 years. Whether it’s income tax, capital gains taxes, property taxes or payroll taxes, there is no just cause to attack the taxpayers who are literally holding down the entire fort. People say the “top 1% this and top 1% that” all the while failing to acknowledge that a person earning $600K a year is in the top 1%, yet they put those people on par with Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. Most people are economically and financially illiterate, and probably should not be flying this plane we call gov’t without an understanding of aerodynamics.
You know people who just lay out their financial lives for you? OK. Considering that 40% of the population don't pay any taxes and that the highest paid employees pay 37% in taxes and that even those living on capital gains and dividends pay around 37% when you factor in company taxes on the shares they own along with the taxes on their realized gains. I doubt you actually know people who pay less than "poor" people.
Yet 10% pay NINETY PERCENT of the freight for the rest. For ALL the rest. Small detail to omit, huh? Since that enriches you, no surprise. Hypocrisy much?
In _your_ mind "bootlicking" means resisting the involuntary seizure of private wealth by the state? Presumably, then, you think that submission to the state is the _opposite_ of bootlicking? I feel like you've got your vocabulary all scrambled up here.
@@SoMuchFacepalm Yeah; thanks for the advice, though. When I say stop using this platform I mean more for entertainment because I stand the risk of seeing propaganda and lies. It's not that there's any risk of me believing it. It just irritates the pants off me and makes it harder for me to even pretend to believe in a future for mankind ha ha ha ha
@@imzjustplayin Yeah, that's absolutely true! Sorry if I sounded arrogant; I didn't mean to. I hardly ever leave comments, but this bunch of misinformed lies upset me so much that I had to make my stupid comment. I'd like to note that I only listen to people who are prepared to admit that what they are sayiing is just conjecture and not spout some vacuous uninformed twaddle as if it is fact. There's a diifference. I appreeciate you going to all that effort to question my comment that grew from genuine shock.
"Selfish, ignorant citizens elect selfish, ignorant leaders. It's that simple."
~George Carlin
Carlin is irrelevant in this situation.
Carlin created some fabulous sketches and sometimes provided amazing insights, but he also super biased and ended up being wrong about many things. The people who elect the most selfish, most ignorant leaders are, to a large extent, the most well-intentioned, emphatic people who really hope that socialist policies will improve the world.
Statists really would like to simplify the tax code:
1. How much do you make?
2. Hand it over.
You forgot making exceptions for their friends.
Pay your taxes, you selfish, ignorant Americans.
Immediately on seeing the chart i thought " what poor person pays 24% in taxes?
A progressive college professor would never alter the data. LOL
If this "research" wasn't manipulated then he could write a fact article not an opinion article.
Shockingly stupid comment - what gets published as "opinion" article has NOTHING to do with its quality and truth content, it ONLY means that the editor wants to distance himself from the content when he expects that there will be a lot of political opposition from the liars who don't want their lies to be exposed.
The corporate tax rate should be zero. Corporate profits (or revenues) should only be taxed when are transferred to individuals, because that's when the profits become income.
Exactly. The current regime is double taxation
@@bobtuiliga8691 I wonder what unions and so-called pro labor groups would say if profits were taxed before taking out labor costs. I'll bet they would scream bloody murder!
They changed corporations into people so they could tax everybody twice.
The current system incentives taking high financial risks since interest payments are 100% tax deductible but retained earnings are taxes at a stupidly high rate, no wonder all interest rate increases are devastating to business when having a financial buffer is punished by the tax code...
@@---...---...---...---... I'm not an accountant, but I assume retained earnings are profits that sit in a company's bank account without being assigned to any specific person as income. I'm not sure how that should be treated tax-wise. For a privately-owned company, that money is effectively the owners', so it should be probably be treated as income for those owners. However, what if a company is just saving it for future investment, for example a large capital purchase to expand the business. That doesn't seem like it should be taxed at all, but how can the IRS predict how the funds will be used in the future?
"If Socialists understood economics, they wouldn't be Socialists." - F.A. Hayek, economist.
@OnlineEcosystems My man!
Glad to hear it!
@OnlineEcosystems Wow, that quite the upside down switch. Did your head used to be coming out of your a$$, but then you transplanted it to your neck?
Chinese and Vietnamese economists seems to understand it better than Western ones.
Also nothing screams about understanding economy better than global crisis every decade or so
@AtticusKarpenter LOL uh-huh, tell me more about the collapse of the Soviet Union, Perestroika, and the CCCP taking measures to become more capitalistic to draw in Western businesses.
Tell me you've never been to a Communist country without saying you've never been to a Communist country LOL
@@AtticusKarpenter You mean the boom and bust cycle Hayek is famous for advocating against? You basically just proved Hayek right in real time. Probably the worst own-goal I've ever seen on the internet.
Personally, I don't get the whole comparing percentages thing. If I pay 24% on $100,000 that's still a whole lot less actual dollars than 23% on $1,000,000.
It's because some people think people shouldn't have more wealth than they 'need'. Progressive tax structure is inherently unfair with the only fair tax being a flat tax.
You are forgetting the part that you will be left with lot less money to invest if you are paying tax at 24% for 100,000.
Tax on poor is really bad of the purchasing power and their by the whole economy.
Taxation, to the narrow extent it is legitimate, should be used only to fund explicitly Constitutional programs. Not one penny should be used for any other purpose. The tax system should not be used to influence human behavior, either in the form of incentives or disincentives. No group of persons should be singled out for special tax treatment, either to their benefit or their detriment. Every adult should have to have skin in the game, otherwise we are stuck with the system as it currently is, with a very large portion of the populace paying no taxes, yet able to vote for the people who will tax others.
Bro law enforcement influences human behavior
Correction, there - a very large portion of the populace doesn't KNOW that they are paying taxes - much less how much they are paying.
Even if you happen to be in one of the few places that doesn't have a sales tax, you are still paying property tax on your apartment, the property tax on the places where you buy things, the business taxes and fees on those same places, the personal taxes on the owners (so that they have money left over from their profits to buy things), etc.
All hidden from you - even if you TRY to figure out how much you're actually paying, you just can't.
@@youngmanoldman32 He said the tax system. Not other things.
What I find misleading is the language "..share of America's wealth". What a joke that is. America has no wealth. Americans create wealth through invention and labor. That wealth belongs ENTIRELY to the people who produce it... not to consumers, not to the government (except for government services... and apportioned to their value, which is often precious little when you factor in all the red tape and waste). Also, 'share' suggests a zero sum game, where the wealth in the country is limited, and so if the super rich have a lot, they've somehow taken it from the rest of us. Huge corporations GROW the economy, and they don't take anything, they sell. The super rich are the people driving gigantic corporations that earn 100s of billions by selling expensive products and services to 100s of millions. It's entirely a matter of scale. Apple stock, for example, is 16 BILLION shares of $164 per share. That's a 2.6 trillion dollar "market capitalization,"..basically the value of the company. In return for those earnings, 100s of millions of us have iPhones, iPad, awesome computers, etc. And we all traded honestly with Apple for these incredible products and services. Economists like Zucman and Piketty not only want the awesome products created for "the people," but they want to take back the earnings of Apple et al. and give those to "the people" as well. They're just thieves and parasites.
I would argue that every country *_does_* have wealth, and *_one unit_* (dollar, etc.) of each country's respective currency is *_one share_* of that country's respective wealth.
@@aliendroneservices6621 the number of shares is not static - it goes up and down over time - due to inflation and to economic activity. Also the main point of the OP is that the rich are essential to the economy not detrimental.
Screw apple don't need them don't want them
Ofc my man, Musk, Bezos and such dudes are such godsent geniuses so they make hundreds of bucks every second from their corporate shares, even in their sleep. Anyone who thinks that this is not how system should work are thieves, parasites and communists, of course
but when crisis blow, government pour trillions of people's tax money into saving those corporations. American army fight to protect interests of America's fruit corporations in South America or oil corporations in Middle East. Almost all states give huge preferences and tax cuts to corporations.
But when question about giving something extra instead of taking, here capitalism comes in full swing and corpos not owe nothing to anyone. Hilarious.
Somehow Huawei creates amazing smartphones (that since last year surpassed Apple in sophistication) without having a burden of super-rich owners, its state owned.
Not to mention corporations not only create ideas, but also destroy them, by buying out and closing start-ups with ideas that are bad for money making (like concept of smartphone from blocks that can be disassembled so owner can buy and upgrade blocks one by one - only camera, for example, or only battery. That start up was buyed and buried, because corpos want you to buy whole smartphone each time, to give them more money)
So, in conclusion, you are really bad at understanding both economy and corporations, and clearly live in some simplified utopian capitalist world how it was seen in 1900s
It’s not just misleading. It’s revealing. It shows you their collectivistic mindset.
10:26 Solution: eliminate taxes on *_both_* wages and corporate-income.
Solution: eliminate _taxes._
There really is no way to figure “personal income taxes” for every individual to use as a comparison. My wife is a partner in a Limited Liability Company. The company’s income taxes are a combination of the company and the three partners. That’s three families’ “personal income tax” that can’t be separated in a way that matches say, the director of a hospital or a senator or a restaurant manager.
Raise their taxes immediately! Don’t they know we have endless wars to fund?
Those wars are a drop in the bucket compared to the social welfare programs.
Ukraine won't pay for itself!
Corporate taxes should be abolished precisely because they confuse the issue of who is being taxed.
Trouble is, politicians see confusion as a feature, not a bug.
Income tax should be abolished as long as we pay VAT.
' Paying Income Tax Is Illegal .'
Not paying income tax is illegal
How about the double (to put it mildly) taxation of corporate profits. Did they count THAT?
They do the same with climate data.
Roughly 31.4% of income earners in the US did not have a Federal Income Tax liability in 2022 (per IRS). Per the National Taxpayer Union Foundation, the bottom 50% of wage earners shouldered 3% of the total income taxes while the top 1% paid 40% of the total Federal Income taxes.
Your mind is going to be blown when you find out that there are more taxes than simply income taxes.
The top 10% of earners pay (≈ $170k+) approximately 76% of federal income tax.
The whole video is about how the chart was manipulated to deflate the billionaires' effective tax rate, and here I am still shocked by the fact that they removed the earned income tax credit in their calculation of the effective tax rate paid by the bottom half of income earners. That's insane! Being a refundable credit, the earned income tax credit reduces the effective tax rates for almost half of income earners to less than 0%: meaning they don't pay the government taxes, the government pays them! That's the most outrageous manipulation of this chart! Not the corporate tax thing!
Tax was 0% in 1910....
For everyone.
Turned out very sweet in 1920s, isn't it?
One of the last refuges for free market classical liberalism. Keep up the great work.
If I make $50k and year go and spend $200 dollars on groceries and someone making $1,000,000 a year goes and buys the exact same cart full of food they won't spend as large a percent of their income as I will. That's called arithmetic or math. That's Maths for you Europeans. It doesn't mean we should punish them for their success. We should ask them how the built that income and emulate them instead of wallow in jealousy.
If you keep on with that line of reasoning, you are definitely not going to be invited to any Democrat party gatherings or meetings. You will be persona non grata with Pocahontas and company 😊
The way to "equity" is that you pay $5 for a sandwich - but somebody who makes $1 million dollars pays $100 for the same sandwich.
@@reality9451 Guess what? They won't buy the sandwich and whoever is selling it will lose out.
@@reality9451 that's socialism, and the million dollar earners normally will take the hundreds of jobs they had created and relocate to a nearby democracy where they are not punished for their success
LOL
You really can't understand that amount of product (and money, because if there is much more money than product then inflation will even this out) in economy is always finite, so everyone can't be rich, so any rich person become such at expense of someone not becoming rich (or even more people not becoming middle class instead of poor)?
And yes, if they are magically compelled to answer truthfully to your question, they would admit that they cheated, lied and killed their way to success, but i guess you would like to emulate that.
I swear, this comment section is last asylum for naive believers in classical monetarist capitalism right from the times of Netherlands Bourgeois Revolution against Spanish occupation. Love how your knee-jerk reaction is always "you jealous of them!11" while normal people clearly state that they don't want to be rich, because (especially with greater transparency thx to age of social media) rich people on average not happier than middle class people. Its you are who want to be rich, so you offended on their behalf even though you are not rich yourself, so its you who are jealous of them
Where did they get this idea that people in the bottom half of earners pay upwards of 20% of their income in taxes? I have often seen it shown that the bottom half of Americans have a zero or negative effective tax rate. My effective tax rate was NEGATIVE 19% last year. I am married with four children, last year I made $42k and thanks to the Earned Income Credit and Child Tax Credit my refund was $8000 MORE than I paid in. Hence, negative 19%. I've had years where my effective rate was negative 50%. Even without dependents any individual or household making the average income or less is in the 12% tax bracket BEFORE making the standard deduction.
I suppose if they include things like sales taxes on common purchases, DMV and other government fees, and property taxes (even if they are renters) they could push the number up that high. But none of those are imposed at the Federal level and unless they also factored that into what the rich pay it's not a fair comparison.
For here on out can we just say “the top .01%” instead of the “top 1%”. It’s extremely misleading.
FFS this doesn't even count consumption taxes, fees and other burdens as a percentage of income. All these guys are full of BS.
I can personally guarantee that the bottom half of earners do NOT pay 24% federal tax on their income. Bottom half of earners end up going closer to 8%.
Liz, vaping during the cast is unprofessional.
I'm curious: what is the breakdown of donation to 501(c)3 organizations as a percentage of income between high earners and low? Just because people aren't "donating" to the federal government doesn't mean they aren't affecting society in other ways.
Lies, damed lies, and statistics.
Greed is taxation for special interests, which is anything that goes to a group
If the government really wanted to tax people equally or at least proportionally, get rid of the income tax and institute a national sales tax. Rich people don't get salaries or a lot of other forms of wages. Stock options, loans and dividends do not get taxed like wage and salary income. A national sales tax would be fairer in that the rich could not skate paying it, like they can with income.
Not really. A sales tax only would massively benefit the rich since the proportion of their income that they spend (and would be subject to taxation) is far lower than for the poor. Poor people have no choice but to spend a high amount of their earnings on basic things like food
@@nh1776 Look into the Fair Tax. It gives a rebate (called a prebate) to offset the cost of taxes up to the poverty spending threshold, so the poor still wouldn't pay taxes.
@@therealcoachdarrell interesting. Not going to happen but interesting nonetheless
I love the left man. Its like watching penguins protest in favor of melting the ice caps. They don't really understand what they're doing but they sure are passionate about it.
These figures are even worse, when you factor in credits for assets and capital gains over time, to wealthy as much as net income after taxes! 😱
Why even have a corporate tax? And why are there tax brackets for corporations?
I'm one of the higher income earners in the US -- I think I'm in the top 5-10% of households. My effective tax rate is 25% Most people are taxed WAY less than that, so I don't even believe the bottom half of Zuckman's chart.
It is not a matter of income, it is a matter of outgo?
Lies, damned lies, and statistics. Also, pay no attention to the Fed money printer behind the curtain.
If they actually cared about the truth they would use effective tax rate.
It is amazing to me that we're still debating corporate taxation. Businesses don't pay taxes any more than they pay salaries, rent, overhead or any other expense. We pay their bills as consumers of their products or services. Without our dollars they don't exist. Only individuals, the end users, pay taxes. In other words, taxes are just as much the cost of doing business, passed along to the consumer as anything else a business does to keep its doors open. Taxing corporations is a tax on ourselves.
Liz smoking during these is so weird. Like, you get paid to be there, at least be off that for a bit.
Let's pretend for a second here that the corporate tax burden is solely owned by the "rich". You can't just ignore the fact that they also have to pay capital gains tax too in this equation. It is essentially a tax on the corporate tax.
Why isn't all of corporate taxes passed on to the customer?
I love discovering the details of how academics achieve their desired results. Buried assumptions often lead to policy decisions, especially in the environmental sciences areas of my expertise.
Do any of you know what happens to your mandatory Medicare premium (for Part B) when you make money after age 65? How about when you take money out of your IRA. Let's say you take out 60,000 from your IRA to make a major purchase, such as home upgrade or buy a SUV. Guess what happens to the Medicare premium. UP. *A LOT.*
So imagine what happens to a high income earner taking out 120,000 per year in retirement. Answer, he pays much, MUCH more for Medicare, even though he likely paid FAR more into FICA taxes.
Did they count THAT? There are many, many lower income breaks like that. Tons.
@@Bill_Woo that is a fact, it’s my mom to a T. My dad left her in good shape. It’s a better problem than just getting SS
Companies don't pay taxes. The consumers who use the business are who pay all the taxes. The company is still going to price things in such a way that their take home profit at the end of the year is the same. If you raise their taxes, they just raise prices to match.
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world to lower his taxes.
Good show 👍
Leviathan is insatiable. The more it eats, the hungrier it gets.
The hell is this and why the hell did I get this recommended.
Billionaires already get taxed a ton...unless they actually mean middle class...
Gotta love that vape
Really unprofessional to have on camera.
You'd really expect those numbers to be relatively stable, because tax avoidance works both ways.
If taxes are too high, people will stop doing things that are taxed heavily. If taxes are lowered, people do more things that are taxed. And that's because people want to spend their money, so they'll increase their economic activity until they find the taxes prohibitive.
When claims are supported only by percentages ... BEWARE!
Trickery and lies are afoot!
BTW ... when you paid your taxes ... income tax, sales tax, FICA tax, any tax ... did you pay with percentages?
I did not. I was forced to pay with dollars.
I've looked high and low ... but every bill and every coin I've ever seen was denominated in those pesky DOLLARS.
Never in percentages.
Academia is too ideologically motivated to be trustworthy. The world is full of liars, everywhere, including those in black gowns.
The problem is not that they dont pay enough Taxes. the problems is they have too many loopholes to avoid paying taxes. there are over 9000 tax laws at this point. Its time to Scrap the Whole Tax code in its entirety and start over from scratch and implement a MUCH easier to understand Tax Law without all the loopholes that forgives the working man and gets its money from Sales tax and capital gains tax and only Taxes income for people who make over 1 million per year in salaries!
Eventually all billionaires will live in Monaco.
Top 5% pay 60% of all taxes. Now if you said tax corporations....than youd have an arguement.
Since most of their wealth is in their companies, how many tax payers employees do you eliminate.
Can someone look at the people living in the area that got power after the TVA was established and Jim Crowe share croppers in the south and really tell me wealth inequality is worse today? If I had to pick a country to be poor in, this one is pretty damn good.
I have a suggestion: How about taxing the returns earned by college endowments?
Why aren't all the NYC business moving to Texas yet?
23% is too high.
Congress pay, and any head of a federal department should be equal to the average wage of the American worker.
Yes, the corporate income taxe is a form of double taxation on investment combined with the capital gains taxe, that's what we libertarian always explain when the left states that the capital gains rate is lower than the rate paid by workers on wages, I don't understand why now you would oppose allocating the burden of the corporate income taxe to the shareholders.
I saw that Liz!!
Hell…just take it all 🤔
Whatcha gonna do next year though?
Is there a TL;DR? Like... if this graph is wrong, where's the real one? How wrong is it?
Superstar economist... if he was a superstar, then he would be in the top 400 wealthiest.
I’m it a billionaire but I’m sure I have a few storage spaces that people make money off me that pays into taxes and that’s a small tiny tiny vision
The vaping is distracting and shows a lack of respect for your guest and the audience.
Why is she vaping on air lmao
If you want your research and books to get results which lead to a good career, fame, and money, then you do whatever it takes to retell the narrative. Even if you do a pretty bad job of it, you do better than telling the truth.
This guy’s explanation for everything is so ambiguous. What’s the name of this channel again?
You ask how they massage the numbers, and he just says that they look at the data differently or that they change one little thing. No specific details or examples.
Pointless video for someone trying to discern truth. Lots of rhetoric for those who passionately disagree or agree though..
I might be wrong, but acording to my understanding the problem isnt that the law doesnt tax them enough -
the problem is that the rich can walk around the law ('legally') to dodge the tax they need to pay.
Something that some of the rich people are doing:
Most of the money they have is as company shares and not in the bank - they would get taxed if they sell it.
So instead of selling it, they are taking bug loans with very low intrest rate (intrest rate is low because the risk for the bank is low - worst case the person would have to sell their shares to pay it back) → those loans are not being taxed (or taxed for lower rates) → and how they return the loan you might ask? by taking anther loan from a diffrent lender!
this way they can dodge taxes in a way the avrage person cant.
It doesnt matter that in the law they are taxed the same rates as the avrage person - when they can dodge it.
(i dont excuse Zucman for faking data, but maybe there is something in the way he wants to look at shares)
Which is why income (or interest, or capital-gains) should never be taxed.
If it is legal - you aren't "walking around the law" - by definition!
But that is the problem. So long as politicians write the tax law, they are going to write it to benefit their friends and campaign donors. It changes only when the politicians change who is in a position to write it (and this is a bipartisan thing - probably the most bipartisan thing - because a particular change can benefit the cronies of BOTH parties, it just depends on how many it benefits).
Why is personal income, corporate, and capital "gain" taxed seperatly instead as one flat tax?
4:57 - do you really have to take a “vape hit” on video? It couldn’t wait the ten or so more minutes until the video ended?
The full video is an hour plus, and the actual filming was probably double that time, some people can't wait two hours between hits.
@@JosephFernandez-tj8ld - maybe you wait for the camera to focus on those other than you …
If they really wanted to change taxing to be more fair they should do it by taxing the change in net worth and total consumption each year not income. People like Warren Buffett have a very low income but their net worth can jump huge amounts if the stock prices go up. None of that increase is considered income until you sell the stock which he never does. Where as people who had their homes wiped out in Floods or fires will have a huge loss in net worth but still have a high tax burden due to significant incomes. They cannot deduct the loss where a business can. Many things in the tax code are not fair.
Just close the tax loopholes and support IRS.
Vaping on cam?
I am a fiscal conservative. However I don't understand why we don't tax inheritance more. Taxing productive individuals and corporations is counterproductive. But taxing lucky, unproductive heirs to inheritance makes a lot of sense compared to taking productive entities.
It's not the government's job to decide which entities are productive or un-productive
Communism much?
So when you spend your life building up something, you don't get to do what you want with your own money? And if you want to build a mile long volleyball court with your own money, if the Arbiter of Productivity deems it not to be in the socialist common interest, it's disallowed? Communist much?
Aside from them just being evil, inheritance taxes don't really generate much revenue. If the estate is large enough to be _worth_ taxing, then avoiding that tax is triflingly simple.
@@Justin_Beaver564 Then who is?
@@robertmartin6800 Evil? You just tax the heir an normal income tax the same you tax other income? It wouldn't serve as a revenue generator. It would offset taxes paid by everyone else.
This sounds like boot licking. Any wealthy person I know pays net taxes at less than lower income people, plus, they write off cars, dinners, vacations and all sorts of stuff
Billionaires pay more taxes in one year than a nurse earns in 300 years. Whether it’s income tax, capital gains taxes, property taxes or payroll taxes, there is no just cause to attack the taxpayers who are literally holding down the entire fort. People say the “top 1% this and top 1% that” all the while failing to acknowledge that a person earning $600K a year is in the top 1%, yet they put those people on par with Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.
Most people are economically and financially illiterate, and probably should not be flying this plane we call gov’t without an understanding of aerodynamics.
You know people who just lay out their financial lives for you? OK.
Considering that 40% of the population don't pay any taxes and that the highest paid employees pay 37% in taxes and that even those living on capital gains and dividends pay around 37% when you factor in company taxes on the shares they own along with the taxes on their realized gains. I doubt you actually know people who pay less than "poor" people.
How much do you pay in taxes?
Yet 10% pay NINETY PERCENT of the freight for the rest. For ALL the rest.
Small detail to omit, huh? Since that enriches you, no surprise.
Hypocrisy much?
In _your_ mind "bootlicking" means resisting the involuntary seizure of private wealth by the state? Presumably, then, you think that submission to the state is the _opposite_ of bootlicking? I feel like you've got your vocabulary all scrambled up here.
Another propaganda channel; disgusting that this drek reaches my recommended list. I have to stop using this platform.
You realize you can block it, right?
@@SoMuchFacepalm Yeah; thanks for the advice, though. When I say stop using this platform I mean more for entertainment because I stand the risk of seeing propaganda and lies. It's not that there's any risk of me believing it. It just irritates the pants off me and makes it harder for me to even pretend to believe in a future for mankind ha ha ha ha
It's ok, I'm sure the propaganda channels you subscribe to have the 'real' information.
@@imzjustplayin Yeah, that's absolutely true! Sorry if I sounded arrogant; I didn't mean to. I hardly ever leave comments, but this bunch of misinformed lies upset me so much that I had to make my stupid comment. I'd like to note that I only listen to people who are prepared to admit that what they are sayiing is just conjecture and not spout some vacuous uninformed twaddle as if it is fact. There's a diifference. I appreeciate you going to all that effort to question my comment that grew from genuine shock.
@ Apparently sarcasm is tasteless.
Corporations don't pay taxes!