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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
My all-time favorite TV show! Weeeeeee doggie!
“I’ve got some bad news. They’re not paying us in real dollars. They’re paying us in something called milly-un dollars.”
Ha! I think that was in the very first episode. They went on to inherit furniture like the “billy-yard table. ” My dad, who was from Tullahoma Tennessee, in the vicinity alluded to as Jed’s hometown, always complained that the Clampett’s Southern accents were fake. He was right, as I knew from hearing all my relatives down there, but this was Hollywood, and it all made sense. Believe me, if they really talked like middle-Tennesseers, nobody would have been able to understand them!
We southerners don’t understand hollywood-southern.
You mean the excuse for gas taxes in the first place?
I would.
Some states are actually pretty good about using the gas tax to pay for the roads. Some states, of course, use a lot of that money to pay for parks, subsidies for public transportation, and a variety of other things.
Several years ago my wife and I took the Pennsylvania Turnpike on our way from Ohio to New Jersey. We traveled about 2/3rds the length of the entire turnpike and when we paid the toll at the exit, we were astounded by having to shell-out over forty dollars! Incensed, I later looked up their rates on the Internet and found that if we had taken the entire turnpike the toll would have been 60 Bucks. This was roughly double the amount that the gas would have cost on the trip at the time. And this was just the bottom rate applied to passenger cars. They had nearly a dozen classes higher, all with escalating rates. The top rate was a heavy truck with an over-sized load, and the toll from end to end was an astounding $2,000.00.
I also discovered that these rates had been enacted just a few years earlier by the Democrat-controlled State House and signed by the democrat governor Tom Ridge. In the legislation, they mandated the new tolls and provided that they would increase by 16% every year for the next 20 years. This was because it was mandated that $400 Million was to be siphoned off every year to be given to Pennsylvania’s biggest cities to subsidize public transportation (buses). So, they were taking the money from drivers (many from out of State) and using it to cover bus fares for inner-city people.
I don’t know if they’ve made any amendments to this, but I’ve downloaded their latest toll schedule. It shows that the cheapest fare for a passenger car going end-to-end is now 95 Bucks. If you have EZ Pass, they will whittle it down to 47 Bucks. For vehicles weighing 100,000 pounds, it is 668 dollars.
https://www.paturnpike.com/pdfs/tolls/tolls_2021/2021_Cash.pdf
Government likes EZ Pass not only because it is far more efficient way of collecting money but the pain is delayed until the card needs to be replenished rather than shelling out in real-time.
The final insult is that for all the revenue it generates, the turnpike is never in great shape or well-maintained.
I remember hearing that some association of truck drivers had for many years running declared Pennsylvania to have the worst roads in the country. Here’s the link to an article that compares all 50 states and ranks them on the quality of their roads vs how much is spent. North Dakota comes in best and New Jersey worst.
Another interesting statistic I heard is that half of all road tolls collected from motorists in America come from just three States – Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. So I guess Joisey has the worst roads combined with the highest tolls – a real winning combination!
I notice that Tennessee is ranked in the top ten. The roads are in the worst shape I can remember them being in.
This is a great thread and it’s not very long.
This guy is really thoughtful. This freight train was unleashed by the very stupid concept of central bank discretion and the Fed dual mandate. They should not have so much power to just guess at stuff and shove it down our throat’s. It’s horrible and now we are getting Socialism because of it.
What could possibly go wrong.
I once took a micro-econ class from an experimentalist. He would talk about the kind of experiments they used to be able to do with lab animals, rats, pigeons, etc. One was along the same lines. It was possible, according to the lab results to get animals to take risks that they wouldn’t ordinarily take. But it required putting them on a starvation diet, and introducing another task that either paid off in more food, or no food at all.
But for humans, previous experiments seem to work the opposite way. Lowering the top marginal tax rates resulted in more heavyweight championship fights, actors making more movies in the same year, etc. I didn’t think it would be that hard to notice that people work harder when they get to keep more of what they earn. Of course, the labor supply curve does bend backward after some point. After some level of work, which is different for everyone, people want to enjoy the fruits of their labor.