Comment on What is the argument for making poor/working class folks shoulder the burden of taxes?
orcrist@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
You didn’t tell us what you meant by “shoulder the burden”. Maybe you should have, or at least if you did it would allow more focused answers.
Some people that I have spoken with are fans of a flat tax. They think that income tax should be 10% on everyone, no matter what. They think that is fair.
In order to maintain that belief in fairness, they also need to magically forget about: the ultra rich, passive income, capital gains, the existence of businesses that have a different tax code, and the fact that they probably actually endorse various tax breaks.
On a side note, I think one of the underlying causes of people being willing to try to forget all of these obvious facts of life is the gut assumption that big banks and ultra rich people who are running scams or finding loopholes are doing so in a very complicated way, so there’s no chance we could figure out what’s happening and stop it. But what forensic accountants point out from time to time is that many of the scams and loopholes are new variations on old tricks. We can understand how they work, but it takes effort, because the names change and the money moves in slightly different ways.