RAISING TAXES
NateBizzo
2,328 Posts
I'm ready to pay more taxes and make the sacrifice in order to protect our future health as a country. Who's with me?
NateBizzo
2,328 Posts
Comments
I, mean, I like the idea of high speed rail and desalinization of ocean water.
Is that a parody question?
i quite like the idea of knowing that i could stay a week in the hospital and not have to sell my house. trust me, give it a whirl.
what million dollar bills look like
Yeah, Massachusetts, where I am a resident.
It's not the socialism that bothers people, but they are a little irked that health care costs have gone up close to 40% in first three years after being instituted.
Bill Gates is one of the most generous and charitable men in U.S. history, having donated over 30 billion dollars to various causes.
But when it comes to paying taxes, he has his critics....
http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-tax-support-2010-9
Personally I will pay whatever amount of tax I am asked to with the blind hope it will go towards solving those problems it is intended to. (I did my taxes this past weekend and I paid more in total taxes in 2010 than the median household income in the U.S.) And I'm not rich by any stretch of the imagination.
Like Horseleech, I'd like to see some guarantees and accountability from those who will be spending it, but that's nothing new, nor will it happen.
I'd also like to see an internet commerce tax plan be enforced.....I've been paying mine for 13 years, there's no reason everyone who sells anything via ECommerce shouldn't be paying their fair share as well.
http://oregoncatalyst.com/3750-Oregon-Measure-66-67-failure-now-national-news.html
Oregon Measure 66-67 failure now national news by In the news Tuesday, December 21. 2010
Oregon???s Vanishing Millionaires
The Wall Street Journal Editorial
December 21, 2010
Oregon raised its income tax on the richest 2% of its residents last year to fix its budget hole, but now the state treasury admits it collected nearly one-third less revenue than the bean counters projected. The sun also rose in the east, and the Cubs didn???t win the World Series.In 2009 the state legislature raised the tax rate to 10.8% on joint-filer income of between $250,000 and $500,000, and to 11% on income above $500,000. Only New York City???s rate is higher. Oregon???s liberal voters ratified the tax increase on individuals and another on businesses in January of this year, no doubt feeling good about their ???shared sacrifice.???
Congratulations. Instead of $180 million collected last year from the new tax, the state received $130 million. The Eugene Register-Guard newspaper reports that after the tax was raised ???income tax and other revenue collections began plunging so steeply that any gains from the two measures seemed trivial.???
One reason revenues are so low is that about one-quarter of the rich tax filers seem to have gone missing. The state expected 38,000 Oregonians to pay the higher tax, but only 28,000 did. Funny how that always happens. These numbers are in line with a Cascade Policy Institute study, based on interstate migration patterns, predicting that the tax surcharge would lead to 80,000 fewer wealthy tax filers in Oregon over the next decade.
The tax wasn???t enacted into law until June 2009 but was retroactively applied to January 1, 2009. So for the first half of the year wealthy Oregon residents weren???t able to take steps to avoid the tax ambush because they didn???t see it coming. This suggests that a bigger revenue loss from tax mitigation strategies will show up on tax return data in 2010 and 2011. The Revenue Office has already downwardly revised tax collection projections for the first three years by one-third.
The biggest loss of revenues came from capital gains receipts. The new 11% top tax rate applies to stock and asset sales, which means that Oregonians now pay virtually the highest capital gains tax in North America. Instead of $3.5 billion of capital gains in 2009, there was only $2 billion to tax???43% less. Successful entrepreneurs like Nike owner Phil Knight don???t get rich by being fools with their money. They don???t sell tens of millions of dollars of assets when capital gains taxes go up.
The tax defenders in the Salem legislature blame the decline on the state???s lousy economy, with unemployment having risen to 10.6%. ???This is a temporary thing,??? argues Phil Barnhart, a Democrat who helped to write the tax increase, adding that he???s ???pleasantly surprised??? that only one-third of the estimated revenue was lost.
All of this is an instant replay of what happened in Maryland in 2008 when the legislature in Annapolis instituted a millionaire tax. There roughly one-third of the state???s millionaire households vanished from the tax rolls after rates went up.
If Salem officials want to find where the millionaires went, they might start the search in Texas, the state that leads the nation in job creation???and has a top income and capital gains tax rate 11 percentage points lower than Oregon's.
Hence the need for federal tax reform. They won't leave 'merica.
This is a much more viable approach than just 'raising taxes'. Our tax rate is about what it should be (except I believe that the wealthiest should pay a bit more). Can anyone name a country with super high tax rates that has a healthy economy?
Our tax rate is not the problem, the problem is that more and more of our commerce is going untaxed, largely due to internet activity. A flat tax of 5% on all internet commerce would do more to generate revenue than tax increases, which often fail to bring in the money they are intended to. It might also drive people back into stores etc and help re-establish floundering local economies.
i'm in
[and back on soulstrut after a long fucking time - hope everyone is healthy]
http://www.netatty.com/articles/tax.html
Some recent millionaires that have renounced their citizenship and moved overseas include Mark Harris Getty and Christopher Ronald Getty, grandsons of John Paul Getty,67 Kenneth Dart, president of Dart containers Corp.,68 Michael Dingman, chairman of Abex,69 J. Mark Mobius, 70 Richard Minns,71 John Dorrance III, heir to the Campbell Soup fortune,72 John Templeton, 73 and Joseph Bogdanovich, vice chairman of H.R. Heinz Co.74
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704471904576228481264189632.html
The Internet Tax Mirage
Politicians try to drive online commerce ???and revenue???out of state.
Governor Pat Quinn recently added to his reputation as America's most taxing politician by signing a law applying the state's 6.25% sales tax to Internet purchases made in Illinois. Within hours, Amazon, the online book and merchandise seller, announced it would discontinue using any of its 9,000 Illinois small business affiliates to avoid having to collect the tax. Congratulations, Governor.
The issue of whether and how states should tax Internet sales is back as one of the hottest in state legislatures. Colorado, New York, North Carolina and Rhode Island already impose some version of what has become known as the "Amazon tax," and at least a dozen other deficit-plagued states are advancing similar bills. This political brawl unites liberals with brick-and-mortar retailers, such as Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Target, against taxpayers and such online retailers as Amazon and Overstock. Internet sales reached $165 billion last year and have been growing by nearly 15% annually.
The first issue is whether the Amazon tax is constitutional. New York's law is now being challenged in court as a violation of the Supreme Court's landmark 1992 Quill decision. In that case the High Court ruled that a state cannot impose a tax on a company if it does not have a physical presence in that state.
This decision originally applied to mail order sales, but the same principle applies to firms that sell over the Internet. If the company does not have an office, store or warehouse inside a state, the state cannot compel the firm to collect sales tax. Illinois and others are trying to broaden the concept of physical presence to include doing business with any affiliate inside the state's borders, such as online advertisers.
...
The big retailers say that imposing state sales tax on e-commerce will level the playing field. But Internet firms don't use government services in the way that retailers do. If Amazon's headquarters in Seattle catches fire, no Illinois fire fighter is going to put it out. It also seems an undue burden to require Internet firms to comply with 8,000 separate sales tax jurisdictions around the country. The retailers have tried for years to get Congress to approve a "streamlined sales tax" compact among the states as a way to collect Internet taxes, but this seems unlikely to pass and many states would refuse to join in any case.
I'm not even talking about state sales tax for the buyers, just Federal income tax for the sellers for a start.
I'm not an expert on the laws here, but as a store I pay taxes on whatever profit I make, be it on the internet or elsewhere.
This is why I suggested a flat tax that applies nationwide and a rate that is a bit lower than most state's sales tax.
I am guessing that the money collected from prior taxes was mismanaged.
If indeed you're claiming your internet sales.....being a store it's harder to hide, but there are plenty of sellers on the internet that just don't report their sales or pay taxes on their profits.
So much so that there are laws being put into place to curtail this tax "cheating".....One such law went into effect on 1/1/11.
Starting in 2011 all US payment providers including paypal will be required by the IRS to report sales information about certain merchants to the IRS . (These "certain merchants" is anyone with more than $20K in gross sales and 200 transactions)
They will also upgrade the account of any seller who meets the criteria to a "Business" account and you will need to fill out the new IRS 6050W form when filing your taxes.
You can go to your paypal account to find out about the reporting guidelines to IRS with the form 6050w.
I'm also not against a flat 5% Federal Sales tax on all Internet purchases....this would solve the dilemma Saba presented.