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Pastimes : My House
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To: Solon who wrote (2487)10/10/2002 12:37:36 AM
From: TimF  Read Replies (1) of 7689
 
Just because "most" of the tax cuts do not go to the rich does not mean that the rich are not benefitting from tax cuts; nor does it mean that their overall burden is increasing.

Of course when the taxes are cut its unlikely that their burden is increasing. When taxes are raised later there burden increases.

49.99 percent of the rich could be getting tax cuts and the 50% whom are not are not necessarily paying higher taxes.

If you cut the tax rates on the rich to a small enough amount that more money goes back to the not rich then goes back to the rich you will have either an enormous tax cut for everyone who is not rich or a minimal perhaps insignificant tax cut for the rich. "The rich" could be defined in this case as the group that is considered too wealthy to get any decent sized rate cut because then "most of the benefit will go to the rich. Yes you could say everyone with an income over the 70% is rich and give lots of cuts to the 70th to the 90th % while soaking those in the top 10% but someone is going to get soaked if the rich can never be allowed to get a bigger share of tax cuts despite the fact that they pay the most taxes.

By your logic, if MOST of any tax cuts DID go to the rich, then eventually they would approach zero % taxation.

No that would only be the case if they did not get most of any increase but they do get the biggest part of almost any increase and Poet indicated that she had no problem with that. It seems that you don't have a problem with it either but since you have not actually said so I can't fairly state that it is actually your position.

There certainly is no call for making a statement that this will make their burden approach 100%. Tax increases are limited by natural economic factors and by common sense.

In the real world it is likely that eventually the rich will get the biggest benefit from some important tax cut but if you never allow this to happen despite these factors then tax cuts would approach 100% eventually. Fortunatly there is enough middle class people who really don't want to soak the rich or at least not soak them to much that in practice there is some limit to how high taxes are likely to go.

I fear you are losing the substance of the dscussion by extrapolating into the ludicous. At a certain level of taxation there would be no more rich people.

The ideas I was arguing against did not allow for any limit. In the real world the idea will not be allowed to run without limit but showing what would happen if it did become the most important idea in the setting of tax rates IMO shows a weakness in the idea.

Tim
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