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Taxing Rich Doctors?
We pay $350k a year in taxes and can’t afford a house.
AOC wants to tax the rich. She also denies that she’s levying a tax on doctors.
Democrats want to raise taxes on couples making above $450k a year. My wife and I are both doctors. That would certainly increase our tax burden. We already pay about $350k a year in federal and state taxes (not including our insane gas tax). We aren’t starving, so this isn’t a call for pity. However, despite us making enough to garner such a large tax bill, we still can’t afford to buy a house.
Clearly part of our problem is the extraordinarily high cost of living in our chosen area. We currently rent a place that has a leaking roof, a mouse infestation, and appliances which occasionally function as intended.
I didn’t become a doctor to become rich. With the amount of time and training I’ve invested, the effort would have had a much bigger ROI in finance, tech or some other sector.
Still, I’d like to be able to afford a house. That quintessential part of the American Dream.
So, yeah, stick it to us rich folks. That’ll show us for wanting to own extravagant things like a single-family home…
Published in Economics
I have a lot of millionaire clients and the occasional billionaire. Many of these people are avowed Democrats, though I avoid political discussions with them. I do secretly want to ask them all “What do you think of the loud Democrat cry that the rich are not paying their fair share of taxes?” I haven’t got the heart to actually query them.
I saved this a while back and post it whenever someone says to Tax the Rich. And my follow up question is how much is the right amount? You will never get an answer.
“In 2018, the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers (those with AGI below $43,614) earned 11.6 percent of total AGI. This group of taxpayers paid $45.1 billion in taxes, or roughly 3 percent of all federal individual income taxes in 2018.
In contrast, the top 1 percent of all taxpayers (taxpayers with AGI of $540,009 and above) earned 20.9 percent of all AGI in 2018 and paid 40.1 percent of all federal income taxes.
In 2018, the top 1 percent of taxpayers accounted for more income taxes paid than the bottom 90 percent combined. The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid roughly $615 billion, or 40.1 percent of all income taxes, while the bottom 90 percent paid about $440 billion, or 28.6 percent of all income taxes.”
https://taxfoundation.org/publications/latest-federal-income-tax-data/
No, she wants to mock the poor. Different thing entirely.
If you want more of something, you subsidize it. If you want less of something, you tax it.
So when we tax extremely high incomes, what are we taxing? Hard work. It would appear that we want less hard work.
Unless I’m missing something here…
You are doing compensation all wrong. You need an equity deal and deferred compensation. Something like how law partners develop equity over time.
Now do it for FICA taxes.
Yeah… except I chose to work at a primarily Medicaid hospital. I’m an employee and there’s no equity to be had.
We need a tax system where everyone has skin in the game. If you make $10/year, part of that should go to taxes. I’m not quite sure how you work that in a welfare society.
Amen. When I used to design income tax bills, I used to point out that the problem isn’t so much the taxes, but the spending. And if you exempt a large portion of the population altogether, how do you get them to not take “free” stuff that they value more than their contributions (zero) to pay for it?
I read a few years ago some analysis that a very high percentage of people who are in the income brackets of the lower regions of these “tax the rich” are in those brackets only for a limited time. They are professionals who have 5 – 10 years of high income at the peak of their career , generally around age 45 – 60. Before and after they have more modest incomes. And those high income years are also when they’re really trying to get their retirement plans set. High tax rates don’t punish the rich. The prvent the not-rich from becoming rich.
More often, only once, the year that they sell a lifetime of investments in a small business or farm.
Excellent point, and commonly overlooked. Oh, and then do it for FICA on the self-employed.
What you are doing is charitable and kind.
If I were the king, I would thank you and give you a tax break.
I think if you were to find a good real estate broker, a friend of a friend perhaps, you might be surprised at how genuinely helpful that person can be. The situation may not be as bleak as it appears at the moment. My husband and I have worked with really wonderful brokers, and one of our friends is a broker. If you lived on the East Coast, I know he’d figure out a way to make a house work for you financially. There’s someone in your area who can do that, I’m sure.
You would be a very kind king.
I’m not looking for a pity party, though. I’m compensated very handsomely for what I do. It’s less than I could get in private practice, but I am not starving. I just can’t afford a house and a large part is because of my tax bill.
It’s also ironic when I go to our local dog park, people have spray-painted everywhere “eat the rich.” I guess my taxes aren’t high enough to save me from cannibalism.
I don’t understand. People that make half — one quarter — your net income can afford houses.
“Hey poor people – see those guys? They’re the ones who have all your money.” – millionaire politicians pointing at ‘the rich’
Frankly, ‘rich’ is a social construct.
We live in a country with a large portion of spoiled ungrateful brats, who don’t know how good they have it. If you make something like $33,000.00 per year, you are in the world’s top 1% of wage earners. On top of that, you have access to more goods and services here than anywhere else. Envy is almost the defining quality of people on the left. I agree with Dennis Prager who says that the quality of gratitude makes all the difference between people who are happy and those who are miserable.
That is all too true.
Your tax burden is crazy and unfair, but you really should move. There are several low or no state income tax states where the quality of life is really quite high.
I have mentioned several times my proposal which is an alternative to what we have now and proposed replacements like flat and fair tax. Tax states and not people. Base the tax on per capita. Let each state raise its taxes however it sees fit. This will get the Feds out of our private lives. States already have a mechanism for collecting revenue. Repeal the 17th so states have a voice in the budget process. A tax the rich state might see its rich moving elsewhere. States will resist sending money on a trip to DC to be skimmed then returned with strings attached. Redistributive spending mostly would be at the state level.
In a normal cost of living area, yes. Not where we live.
It is one thing for people who want a bigger safety net to say, “I would be willing to pay more in taxes if it meant I would get a . . .pension, healthcare, etc.” We don’t have that in America. Instead we have, “I would be willing to force Bob to pay more so I can have . . . “
Tax the rich is a joke.
For decades you could sum up Congress this way: Your Rep. (Fighting Jack N. or Honest Bob X.) comes out on the Capitol steps to tell the news team from back in the home district that he has cosponsored the Omnibus Protect Motherhood & Kids Save the Planet Make the Rich Pay Their Fair Share and Renew America bill, HR xxxxx. The bill is, of course, a disaster on many levels. As soon as your Congressman finishes his interview he rushes back to his office and his AA has hung the Open For Business sign on the front office door for the parade of lobbyists lining up.
“Honest Bob, do you have any idea what this will do to the _____industry which employs thousands in your home state?”
“No problem, we will introduce a ____ industry-protection amendment but I will need your support in the form of campaign contributions in my name to the key members on the committee to get that through.”
“Jack, that tax increase will be a real hit on the very people who funded your campaign.”
“No problem. We will insert language to increase or accelerate depreciation on a dozen qualifying assets, create new shelter options and deductions. But I will need your support to get that language in the bill…”
……. and so forth.
The lesson, kids: (a) bad legislation is an opportunity, not a problem–everybody has to come to DC to play or else be the ones with no chair when the music stops; (b) bad legislation actually increases campaign finance and power because Congress transforms itself into a giant protection racket; (c) Congress never simply withdraws a bad bill if instead it can be festooned with amendments, each of which is a deal that the “special interests” have a vital need to protect going forward. (Nice little depreciation allowance/exemption/exception you got there. Be a shame if anything were to happen to it… There will be a fund-raiser on the 14th.. you might want to be there )
The federal tax code, the Clean Air Act and so much of the US Code is an incredible jumble of thousands of pages precisely because Congress pretends to really sock it to the rich and or to those darn corporations then gives a lot of it back in the form of revocable deals.
I remember the first time we got hit with the Alternative Minimum Tax. My wife turned to me and said, “I didn’t know we were rich.”
So this answers my question, What do legislators do when every law that’s fit to make has been made? Threaten to make more laws.
Not just any laws but bad ones.
Taxing the high earners more, or any kind of wealth taxation doesn’t change the fiscal picture of the United States one bit. When you tell that to lefties on Twitter it gets pretty clear they just want to be punitive and they don’t care if it “works” or not.
There is absolutely zero gained by central planning with the tax code, with the possible exception of a deduction to procreate more taxpayers. I am dead serious.
Central planning with the tax code, which is what we do is 100% worthless. Then they try to fix it with more central planning with the tax code etc.
Everybody understands how the Fed is overdoing it and it’s shoveling wealth to the upper 1%. All of those people can simply borrow against that for decades and not declare any income.
The whole system is just massively stupid.