Taxing The Rich Necessitates Control Of Everyone - The Thucydides Trap

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

61% : This formally established different tax treatments for different household/filing statuses (Single, Married Filing Jointly, Married Filing Separately, and later Head of Household). 1970s onward: The introduction of provisions like the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) in 1975 truly brought "household income" to the forefront.
61% : Switzerland already has an International Wealth Tax which is a levy on the total value of personal assets, including bank deposits, real estate, assets in insurance and pension plans, ownership of unincorporated businesses, financial securities, and personal trusts.
59% : Today, the U.S. system is best described as a hybrid: The Tax Computation Starts with the Individual: You are taxed on your individual income.
59% : For example, key benefits, subsidies (like for the Affordable Care Act), and deductions phase out based on the total income of the tax household (e.g., combined income on a joint return).
56% : They also have constantly changed the top tax rate.
56% : This allowed a married couple to combine their incomes, be taxed on the total, but use a tax schedule with brackets exactly twice as wide as those for a single individual.
53% : When the modern income tax was established by the 16th Amendment in 1913, it taxed individuals on their own income.
53% : If the husband was in a high income tax bracket, his wife, with even just a part-time job was now taxed at his rate.
53% : It effectively created a "household" tax unit for married couples, though it was still an option (they could still file separately).
53% : Eligibility for many credits and deductions (like the EITC, Child Tax Credit, IRA contribution deductibility) is based on Modified Adjusted Gross Income (MAGI), which is often calculated on a household basis (e.g., combining income of spouses and sometimes dependents) for the purpose of phase-outs.
53% : In other words, your household situation (single, married, with dependents) dictates your filing status (Single, Married Filing Jointly, Head of Household, etc.), which applies different tax rates and standard deductions.
53% : The Common Reporting Standard (CRS) is a global standard for the automatic exchange of financial account information between tax authorities, designed to combat tax evasion.
52% : Consolidation of the "Household" Concept (Post-1948) The 1948 law established married couples as a tax unit.
52% : and you now must pay a wealth tax on it in Switzerland even though it is on the beach in Florida.
50% : It may be minimal but so was the Income Tax proposed to be 1% in 1913 and rose to 94% by 1945.
48% : To address the fact that two single individuals could sometimes pay less tax than a married couple with the same combined income, Congress created a new tax schedule for single filers that was less favorable than half the married brackets.
46% : I know elderly people who got married simply because of the taxes.
46% : Needless to say, I declined because of the wealth tax.
44% : This created a major disparity because residents of community property states (where income is legally considered jointly owned) could split income between two returns, lowering their total tax bill compared to identical-income couples in common-law property states.
44% : The idea was not to avoid taxes, it was to avoid possible banking failures.
40% : The third disaster is they always get such taxes through promising a minimal tax rate.
38% : Between 2009 and 2016, about 45,000 U.S. taxpayers, had taken advantage of IRS tax amnesty programs to pay more than $6 billion in back taxes and related penalties for having offshore accounts to avoid taxes.
37% : When the US Income Tax was installed, the rate on the hated rich was just 1%.
34% : Just as the billionaires are fleeing California which was demanding a 5% one-time tax, this illustrated these Progressive Democrats do not understand the economy and would be the impact of forcing these people who may be billionaires on paper (NOT CASH) to start dumping shares to pay the tax.
29% : People are often cheering class warfare for they fail to understand by imposing a billionaires tax in California on UNREALIZED gains of 5%, will necessitate dumping stock to raise cash to pay the tax.
28% : Then you still must pay taxes on its value and if the market is in a downturn, you may not be able to sell it to pay all the taxes every government is demanding.
27% : The Democrats have shut down the government over Trump's tax cuts and the top rate is 37%.

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