I’m looking for serious answers to understand the mentality. Please avoid the snark. I know it’s low hanging and tempting but I’m pretty sure most, if not all, of use here on Lemmy “get it”.

I just can’t get out of my head how absurd it is that we, in the U.S. anyway, put so much of the tax burden on working class folks instead of those most benefiting from our economic system.

It seems to me the standard deduction should be at least the median personal income (~$40k) if not the mean(~$60k) with progressive tax brackets adjusted to cover costs thereafter and possibly a supplemental wealth tax.

But I’m not an economist so trying to understand why I’m wildly wrong and this would be a terrible idea either from an economic perspective or from a political perspective.

  • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radio
    28·
    4 days ago

    Mathematics and Politics.

    There are many more people who are “working class” than rich. The argument is that if you take some money from a lot of people, you get more money than if you take a lot of money from some people.

    There’s also the argument that if everyone pitches in, the overall burden for each individual is less.

    What this fails to address is that the richer you are, the more you can play with your money and end up with nothing to tax. This is why the rich get richer and the rest of us don’t.

    Running through all that is a thing called “trickle down economics” which claims that the money from the rich ends up in society, but recent reviews of this have proven this to be nonsense. Politicians use this as an argument for the status quo.

    Finally, the rich shape the narrative. Politicians are essentially elected by the rich through their manipulation of the story through their media empires and social media platforms.

    • ccunning@lemmy.worldOP
      45·
      4 days ago

      The argument is that if you take some money from a lot of people, you get more money than if you take a lot of money from some people.

      That’s all dependent on how much you’re taking and from who which I addressed in my comment.

      There’s also the argument that if everyone pitches in, the overall burden for each individual is less.

      This only makes sense if you define “burden” with a fixed dollar amount. A $6k tax “burden” is going to be a much harder burden on someone who makes $40k than someone who makes $250k

      What this fails to address is that the richer you are, the more you can play with your money and end up with nothing to tax.

      This could be addressed by the wealth tax I mentioned.

      In the end, I do believe it’s politics and the wealthy manipulating people’s perception.

      They’ve got us focused on this bullshit culture war when what we need is a good old-fashioned class war.