Higher Income Tax

Meaning that taxpayers pay more in taxes if they earn more in income. For example, taxpayers may pay 25% of their income in taxes up to a certain amount, and 35% of everything earned over that amount.

All my life my parents never struggled to get me anything. Whether it was toys, clothes, or even food; they always had a way of getting. Now, they aren’t rich but they’re not struggling either. They are just the ordinary simple middle class that pay taxes every year. But the question is should rich people pay more taxes? And I think yes, because the tax code we currently have is unfair.

Another huge problem is the way that the tax code works. As Warren Buffett explains, the “tax code is tilted towards the rich and away from the middle class.” It’s actually upside-down those with more pay fewer taxes, than people with less. Though the top rate for wage-based income is 39.6%, the rate for income from investments (capital gains) is only 20%. That means wealthy people pay a lower tax rate than the rest of us. Examples include Buffett, whose tax rate is about 17%, while

In the constant debate over what should and should not be taxed and how much a person should have to pay in taxes, one issue remains constant. That is the question as to whether or not the U.S. should have a fair tax or a flat tax. This has been interesting for me because I hear a lot of debate on both sides about the legitimacy of both methods. There is an overwhelming feeling, fueled, in part, by the media, that wealthy Americans are not paying their fair share of taxes, when, in fact, that is not the case. In fact, an article from the directory About.com reports the following statistics from the Office of Tax Analysis: According to the Office of Tax Analysis, the U.S. individual income tax is "highly progressive," with a small group of higher-income taxpayers paying most of the individual income taxes each year. -In 2002 the latest year of available data, the top 5 percent of taxpayers paid more than one-half (53.8 percent) of all individual income taxes, but reported roughly one-third (30.6 percent) of income. -The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid 33.7 percent of all individual income taxes in 2002. This group of taxpayers has paid more than 30 percent of individual income taxes since 1995. -Moreover, since 1990 this group 's tax share has grown faster than their income share. -Taxpayers who rank in the top 50 percent of taxpayers by income pay virtually all individual income taxes. In all years since 1990, taxpayers in this group have paid over 94 percent of all

There is an issue that has plagued the United States even prior to the founding of the nation. That issue is fair taxation. While the American Colonists were being taxed unfairly without parliamentary representation, average modern Americans are being taxed unfairly without legal representation. Some hold the belief that the progressive tax code employed by the United States to be fair as the wealthy pay a higher marginal tax rate. The operative word there being marginal. As the upper class typically has a much lower effective tax rate since they are able to afford tax attorneys who are able to find many deductions that average citizens are unaware of. Mitt Romney is a prime example of low effective rates of taxation. According to CNN Money, Mitt Romney made twenty-one million dollars in one year, but only paid an effective rate of fifteen percent, which is much lower than the rate he should be paying. The progressive tax system is one that is littered with loopholes, but those are only known to those with the means to search them out as the federal tax code spans seventy-thousand of pages of convoluted text. Not even the highest paid tax accountants will ever read anywhere near the full volume of tax laws. By the tax code being as long as it is, few are able to reap the full benefits of the tax code. The level of complicated text is not the only major issue with the federal tax code.

It’s not hard for any American to see that our tax system is a bit biased. "One of the issues that I have been preaching about around the world is collecting taxes in an equitable manner, especially from the elites in every country… There are rich people everywhere. And yet they do not contribute to the growth of their own countries. They don’t invest in public schools, public hospitals, in other kinds of development internally,” said Hillary at the Clinton Global Initiative meeting in 2012. Hillary Clinton suspects that American’s need an economy that function’s for everybody, rather than just those at the top believing the wealthy are not paying their fair share. Clinton demanded for a deadline to the tax reductions on the wealthiest Americans

May be if our politicians, thought like this today we would have much less problem. While some may argue that most agree to raise the tax and in doing so punish those they feel badly towards, this is why we have courts and law bodies to prevent rule by popular demand. The rule of mass groups of people is not how our democracy works. When taxes are raised the gap between gross and net pay widens thus as time proven, makes the person slave less and put less aside, because the government already took some of their earnings. Pulling tax from the rich undermines the employed, when taxed, the rich will simply tax the employed, lessening wages. Raising taxes is a failed government strategy. For example, during the holocaust people in most of Germany supported the tyrant Hitler and his regime, though of course it was a horrid and wrong thing to do. Taxes should and cannot be raised for the

A 'fair'/ tax depends on how one defines 'rich' As Grosz (2012) notes this is not so simple; for Obama it was anyone earning more than $250,000 a year. Obama, too, tried to hike tax on the wealthy, but it seems to be the middle-class who are actually getting the shorter end of the stick since the extreme rich don't make their money from working but rather make it from investments, capital gains and dividends (e.g. Condon, S. (December 19, 2012)). The Obama Administration believes that economic distribution is more important than economic growth with money being used for "entitlement programs" (social security and Medicare) and infrastructure improvement. Obama had, originally, insisted that taxes should be increased for anybody earning more than $250,000 whilst money would be spared for the poor. Even the Republicans agreed with this idea. But given this scenario, the wealthy will only receive a gentle lowering in their taxes, whilst it is the middle class who will largely be affected. (Grosz, D. (Dec 19, 20.

Warren Buffet, one of the richest men on earth, tells us to stop coddling the rich. It is time to take him up on that offer. We should start to enforce income tax on the top one percent. In the New York Times article, "Stop Coddling the Rich'', written by Warren Buffet, he says that he paid around seven million in income taxes. That is only seventeen point four percent of his taxable income. While the middle class pays a fifteen to twenty-five percent income tax then get hit with a heavy payroll tax. Ignoring these problems in the United States will only make the middle class weaker, and the rich richer.

Since our tax system is income based, some people do not even pay taxes for example, the poor do not pay taxes. A new tax system will hurt

Raising taxes by 100% on millionaires would hurt an already fragile economy. High tax rates on millionaires or even billionaires would create a lazy population with no incentive to work hard. The rich would invest their lives in a more reasonable country that doesn’t impose such a high tax rate. And the poor would have no reason to work harder because then their benefits would be taken away with the more money they make. I believe that there should be an equal tax rate that everyone pays across the board. Millionaires would be more inclined to give to charities or other organizations instead of holding back due to an outrageous tax. Raising tax rates on middle income earners would also hurt the economy as a whole because there would be no intuitive

It is fair that people who earn more income should pay a higher proportion of their income in tax. The tax supports the administration of their country which provides the sort of operating environment in which they are able to earn their wages in the first place. Even when paying a higher marginal rate on the top end of their earnings, they will still take home more than people who are paid less with a tax rate anything up to 100%.

One of the obvious reasons to raise the taxes of the rich would be because they simply earn more. One example is if two people started the year off with fifty thousand but then let us say one had a rich family member that died and they had received millions through a will, then say they received a gift of one billion by the end of the year they pay the same taxes even though one of they are now a billionaire (Cohen). The reason is that the government does not tax on gifts or wills so then they would not have to pay more taxes if they received a gift that had consisted of a large sum of cash (Cohen). Now there is a large chunk of change out of circulation and now the middle/lower

Tax systems should not discriminate between people within the same income range (they are similar with respect to their ability to pay) and their tax rate should be the same. For example, income taxes are proportional within particular income ranges. This means that citizens in the same income range will bear the same tax burden.

While conducting research for this paper, I focused on four articles that addressed my topic on increasing income taxes on the wealthy to see if, not only would it actually benefit the economy, but also to see economists thoughts on the subject. The articles all state their opinion on the matter and explain why they believe they are correct by backing it with theories and or statistics. The articles I choose are from the credible websites or journals of Forbes, The New York Times, Newsweek, and the Journal of Political Economy.