Tax deferral mechanisms, like IRAs, make a lot of sense, as it helps to smoothen tax obligations across people with different timing of income. If person A makes in four years, {200k, 0, 200k, 0}, this person shouldn’t have to pay more tax then someone who makes {100k, 100k, 100k, 100k}. Many jobs, like sales, entrepreneurship, or anything with incentive based compensation, experience irregular yearly distributions of income.
The argument is a bit weaker for large entities, like Kushners, whose companies should be assumed to be perpetual concerns. However, it still makes sense as a cash flow smoothing mechanism, since it tends to defer tax obligations to when they sell properties and experience a positive cash flow.
Whether rich people in general should pay more tax is an argument that will not be resolved today, or likely ever.
Rich people shouldn’t be asked to pay more, but they shouldn’t be allowed to pay zero tax. I get it that JK is just following the current tax policy, but that’s a case of tax policy driving increasing inequality. Real estate developers aren’t the only ones who take risk in their business, why such generous handouts for them? I lived the past 15 years in Asia, and in places like HK if you have a company you can put anything on it, so you see a guy who owns a toy company driving around in a Lambo that is being depreciated as a business expense (presumably because Lambo’s have large trunks useful for transporting toys). The chairman of SHK pays himself a salary equal to a high school principal, so his tax is low and he takes everything else tax free in dividends. It sounds awesome and it is if you can partake, but HK is one of the most unequal places, with some shocking poverty, and social unrest is running hot…and that’s an nth degree effect.
We are picking winners and losers when we give preferential tax treatments to certain industries…Equality on the other hand would be a nice flat tax, 15% on gross income including dividends and cap gains. No deductions, not even mortgages. Everyone pays. Same for corporates.
I don’t recall being told by the government which industry to go into. Sounds like something a Communist gov would do. Each according to his abilities kinda thing, sound familiar?
The greatest thing we have is our independence. Don’t blame others for your own shortcomings or the family that you were born into. Plenty of people have been able to improve their lot in life and the opportunity is there for everyone to do so.
I can’t source this, it came from a CEO at a recent conference: In 1970, if your parents were in the bottom 25% of income earners, you had a 90% chance of doing better than them.Today you have a 70% chance of doing worse.
What this tells me, is that the destruction of the family, encouraged by progressives, has destroyed minority and working class communities, which is what they want, so that they can continue to control those populations.
There are countless laws about equality etc, but none concerning the preservation or widening of income disparity.
Its easy to blame others and envy their success, but it gets you nowhere, look within!
Please humor me and elaborate on this a little further. Your contention is that social mobility has been destroyed by a political party that has never held any power in this country?
all i know is that when i have more money, that money makes more money, so i want more of it! that way if my kids turn out to be idiots, they can still turn up due to my success. but honestly i dont mind having mostly idiots, i just want 1 cut throat kid and i can die happy.
What political party would that be? PS the tribes own a large part of the land in several states, parts of the Colorado and other rivers etc. Financially, if you live on a reservation you get a check for typically more than the AMI in that area, and that’s just for living there. I was in the southwest for years and its clear you have no clue what actually goes on there.
What is your definition of a progressive? Certainly you don’t meant the Clintons who were fine extending the Reagan war on drugs and crime policies that have overwhelmingly affected minority and working class populations.
Like literally what do you even mean by the “destruction of the family, encouraged be progressives”? Maybe let’s start there.
Ya let’s get into the semantics because that will change the reality. Why were black families more likely to be intact than white families prior to the 1960s and now it’s like 20%? Why are over 500k black babies aborted annually? True conservatives are against both, and Democrats are for.
There is literally nothing progressive about establishment Democrats. That’s not semantics. And I just gave you the reason. We created a racist crime policy to step in for Jim Crow laws that weren’t publicly in favor any longer, which have since been enforced by both political parties.
Are the laws actually racist or is there just a pattern to who is committing the most crime? I suppose youll have another reason why those statistics are racist too
Are you familiar with McCleskey v. Kemp? Gross racial disparities do not have be justified in any way as long as no one is on record of saying something to the effect of, “we predominantly want to lock up black people with this law”.
Ironically, the effect of a law doesn’t matter. If you can prove that the purpose was not racially motivated, you’re free to do whatever you want. So if 98% of those serving a life sentence for a second drug offense are black like they are in Georgia, it matters very little that drug use is split evenly along racial lines. Oops.
The laws of course are not racist, but they are applied in a racist and discriminatory way. Not sure why you are arguing such an obvious point, even Paul Ryan and Mitt Romeny have acknowledged as much. Just look at the opiod crisis, it affects more whites than blacks and it is treated as a public health crisis, with cops and fireman walking around narcan to “rescue” people. Compare that to the crack epidemic of last decade, that affected blacks more than whites and the response across the country was to pass 3 strikes laws.
