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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
It’s all pretty simple and probably undoable. No deductions, no exceptions, low equal rates. Politics might make two rates necessary. Or just borrow it all and eliminate income taxes, or at most a uniform sales tax, almost anything other than the current corrupt, corrupting system. So we borrow it all, rates go up, returns increase and savings, and maybe we’ll even begin to realize that at least 80% is wasted.
Is the supply of stupid finite? Can enough people be that dumb indefinitely?
Gee-sort of like the Founding Fathers envisioned. They were very smart, just didn’t see how quickly their carefully structure could be un-done
It’s like one of those Chinese finger trap things. Plus, the lobbyists and the lawyers own everything in this country. The other thing is, central bank discretion is directly related to Geo political power so it gets real messy. The time to fix it was right after the Soviet Union fell. The point of no return was 2004 for Medicare part D. the financial system blew up in 2008 and now we are even more trapped.
This is why Socialism and populism are an issue right now.
Actually 147 companies own or control every other company in the world, and 4 companies control those 147. Lobbyists and lawyers are light-weights.
This is accurate. How did this happen? Bad central banking and bad financial regulation. Inflationism. It centralized power to government and corporations.
Actually, I had forgotten about this. For several years now I’ve been wondering Why is all this craziness happening? and Why all at once? And why everywhere? And why is every company going along with it? Specifically, for examples, companies going full CRT and banks suddenly forming a conscience against Trump and against owners of alternative media platforms and cutting off their bank accounts, and requiring vaccinations to engage in civic life, all over the world.
And of course the logical conclusion is that there is coordination, and the the only consistent links and coordination I can see is corporate ownership.
That may be true for big business, but isn’t for small business.
This is what kills me. Years ago there were people talking about how corporate balance sheets and income statements could end up being better than government bonds. Look at what is happening. You have fascism, corporatism, and woke corporations etc. Then the government bonds have artificially suppressed interest rates that are more or less paid with printed money. Corporations are real assets and the income they spit out is arguably more real in dependable.
These are just facts and it’s going to get worse.
Well, perhaps. They’re talking about corporations world-wide. From Forbes:
Three systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich have taken a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide and analyzed all 43,060 transnational corporations and share ownerships linking them. They built a model of who owns what and what their revenues are and mapped the whole edifice of economic power.
They discovered that global corporate control has a distinct bow-tie shape, with a dominant core of 147 firms radiating out from the middle. Each of these 147 own interlocking stakes of one another and together they control 40% of the wealth in the network. A total of 737 control 80% of it all. The top 20 are at the bottom of the post. This is, say the paper’s authors, the first map of the structure of global corporate control.
And in another article at Forbes, 4 corporations own controlling interest the 147 corporations:
There may be 147 companies in the world that own everything, as colleague Bruce Upbin points out and they are dominated by investment companies as Eric Savitz rightly points out. But it’s not you and I who really control those companies, even though much of our money is in them. Given the nature of how money is invested, there are four companies in the shadows that really control those companies that own everything.
…
That means the real power to control the world lies with four companies: McGraw-Hill, which owns Standard & Poor’s, Northwestern Mutual, which owns Russell Investments, the index arm of which runs the benchmark Russell 1,000 and Russell 3,000, CME Group which owns 90% of Dow Jones Indexes, and Barclay’s, which took over Lehman Brothers and its Lehman Aggregate Bond Index, the dominant world bond fund index. Together, these four firms dominate the world of indexing. And in turn, that means they hold real sway over the world’s money.
The assertion that these four firms “control” all the other world’s corporations is not that they own them, but that they have and represent investors money, and in turn hold the controlling stock in them.
You can say that again. Everyone complains about the conditions of the roads, but if you ask if they would support a nickel a gallon increase in the gas tax to pay for better roads, most people say no [expletive] way.
But if people suspected that their tax money might be efficiently used to improve their roads, I’ll bet they would approve higher taxes.
This is why I say the government should only produce public goods. It has a definition. I bet 90% of Republican voters have no idea of what I’m talking about. The government can’t add any value beyond actual public goods.
For some reason, after reading the comments, the name John Robert’s comes to mind.
I don’t think so. It’s like social security. Everyone knows it is running out of money. And almost everyone want the program to be saved. But when people are surveyed asking, should we cut benefits, raise taxes, raise the retirement age, or some combination of those options, the majority says No to all of them. We want it funded but nothing should be asked of me. Make others pay.
Curiously, the one item where people do regularly vote to raise their own taxes is on school buildings. Often insane amounts of money. I don’t know why people believe that a building built in the 1980’s is so decrepit that it’s not worth remodeling and must be torn down and replaced. Maybe because they don’t bother calculating how much their own property taxes will go up.
One factor is this class conflict between taxpayers and tax consumers. This notion of a class conflict between taxpayers and tax consumers is a notion within Austrian economics and it is meant to replace the Marxist view that the fundamental class divide in society is between bourgeoisie, the capitalists who own property, and the labour working classes who don’t own property. The Austrian view is that the main class division is between those who on net pay more taxes than they receive in services from the government – this group would be the taxpayers – and the tax consumers are those who on net receive more from the government than they pay. In terms of what a tax consumer can receive, this can range to anything from unemployment insurance payments, social assistance payments, favors provided by the government in terms of inhibiting competitors in your industry. The argument is that in a democracy, if a politician wants to get elected, the name of the game is to get 50%+1. Given that the distribution of the income in modern commercial societies tends to be such that there’s a few rich and wealth tend to be a small segment of the population, and the middle class and lower classes tend to be the majority, the best way to get elected is to offer mostly the middle class all sorts of public goods in terms of social programs and so forth, and then have those financed by the well-to-do who would function as the taxpaying class. That way you get your majority and get elected.
http://financialrepressionauthority.com/2017/07/26/the-roundtable-insight-george-bragues-on-how-the-financial-markets-are-influenced-by-politics/
All politicians, whether the left or the right, both sides of the political spectrum do this. Perhaps the left does this with a bit more conviction guiding their efforts, but on both sides of the political spectrum this happens. So politicians engage in this bidding war every time election time comes, trying to offer the majority all these goodies with the idea that they don’t have to pay for it, someone else will. What ends up happening, I argue in the books, is that after a while of this bidding war where politicians offer more and more public goods, someone has to finance this. Eventually you run out of taxpayers or you run into taxpayer resistance. At that point politicians then resort to the bond market and the bond market has proven historically quite eager to lend funds to the government. Government bonds are very attractive investments for a lot of folks because of the safety. This is money that’s backed up by the power of the state, unlike corporate bonds which are not. Corporate bonds are only paid ultimately if the corporation is successful at attracting people to voluntarily buy their goods and services.
I argue in the book that we now have a kind of financial market-government complex, or a bond market-government complex. The bond market has emerged as a kind of handmaiden to the welfare state, this growth of government. At a certain point, even the bond market will say ‘we can’t lend more’ and at that point politicians will appeal to the money press and they will enlist the central bank to print money, essentially, though it’s more complex how liquidity is injected into the economy, but that’s basically what happens. So essentially democracy leads to fiscal profligacy, too much spent relative to the revenues politicians are willing to collect from people. They then have to go to the bond market; public debt rises. And then to increase their options of financing this deficit that is inherent to democracy, they require control over the monetary supply. My argument in the book is that the gold standard, which existed for a good part of the 20th century in one form in another, which ultimately ended in the early 1970s – August 1971 if you want to get exact – that was in a way written in the DNA of democracy; that democracy ultimately is intentioned with a monetary constraint like the gold standard. That’s one of the ways I make this argument that democracies do damage to the financial markets.
I think there’s a famous quote about this:
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury.”
Alexander Fraser Tytler
You have to stay on a hard money standard. It doesn’t require a gold but that is the easiest way. The problem with that is, you can’t take a military posture without being able to create inflation. Basically the whole planet needs to be on the gold standard.
Furthermore, I’m pretty sure the way the constitution is actually written, you can’t create anything but public goods from government. Woodrow Wilson and the Supreme Court started messing with that and we have never looked back. I’m not an expert, but that’s pretty close.
The constitution is only for people that follow the Judge Learned Hand spirit of liberty speech.
Monarchy > democracy lol
Here is another way to describe the problem.
If central banks do anything except back up the financial system in a punitive way you get the situation we have today. The government is running out of money and there’s all kinds of social problems.
I read something somewhere once that monarchs try to preserve the country because they have heirs to think about.
I think a caveat to your speculation is “Conservatives don’t want to pay more in taxes to make improvements because they know darn well that more money shoveled out to the government hardly ever improves anything.” In fact it usually makes things worse. A good conservative would consider the hypothetical of actually getting better government benefits to be impossible in the overall scheme of things.
My wife and I live in a super-liberal/leftist neighborhood where people routinely vote themselves more tax increases because they are totally convinced that every problem will be solved by just throwing more money at City Hall. The county recently raised our property values, and thus our property taxes, by an average of 90% (That is not a typo!). Instead of complaining (like we did), most people just bent over like Kevin Bacon and said “Thank you sir, may I have another?”
The interest rate is clearly below inflation. Show me one that isn’t and I’ll show you an investment that is too risky. Stocks are over priced by every single metric except interest rates that are artificially suppressed. Literally if you got fair interest rates it would break every single western government.
What if you were smart enough to buy rental property? lol
The window of when this worked well was decades ago.
#MAGA
Walter Williams once said something to the effect that the country would be better off if you took the money you owed in taxes and threw it into the fire.
There’s another trick legislators on their constituents. They will vote to authorize a bill to do XYZ, then later vote against appropriating funds to make it happen. Depending on the audience, they can tailor their message accordingly. They’ll say to one group they supported XYZ in spite of the bad things in it, but they’ll say to another group they voted against XYZ because of the bad things in it.
Or refund my FDIC deductions with interest and adjusted for inflation.