What happens when we tax the rich.

[Dekster]

The trouble with the rich and the tax code is that the tax on wealth is low or non-existent, while the tax on income is high. Those who's labor provides their income are hit with the highest tax rates.

I prefer no tax on wealth at all and that all actual income be taxed equally, regardless of where the money comes from. I'm for a single tax rate but let's not discriminate one source of money over any other. If we've to level the field, it should be level in all regards.

For example, the federal tax liability should be no less for a person inheriting $90,000 than for somebody who has labored to earn $90,000. A tax base universally broad and wide provides the ability for the lowest tax rate needed for federal revenue.

I would be generally fine with treating everything as ordinary income except for maybe the inheritance part of it.

 

[progressive hunter]

We do tax the rich but allow for tax breaks or write offs for investments and business costs like creating jobs...
I'll tell you what taxing the rich won't do and that is bring down the deficit or the debt.... you can tax them @ 90% and the debt. will remain the same....
Libs think if we tax the rich more their income.... or SS payments or welfare handouts will go up... they won't...
In fact they will have to pay more for everything they buy...

those tax breaks and write offs apply to everyone not just the rich

 

[Woodznutz]

But are they really when you think about it? I mean technically my wife and I have made that jump but in the end we won't be by the time we put 3 kids through college, retire a little early, and have to start paying taxes on all that tax-deferred money we have piled into the retirement accounts. From my perspective we are just locked into the comfortably middle class for the rest of our lives. If you take into account future realistic expenses, we are really just pre-paying for the ordinary.

Why would you pay for your kid's college?

 

[Woodznutz]

Why are liberals not demonizing and threatening the rich in their party?
Rich celebrities who take millions in order to tell you who to vote for. Why are liberals not shaming these people and demanding they do this stuff for free and stop taking tax breaks?

Maybe because they support liberal causes, therefore they get a pass.

 

[Dekster]

Why would you pay for your kid's college?

WTF? Do you not have kids? I suppose if you don't think attending to their education is important, my pragmatic response is so they can get jobs and buy houses and not sponge off me their entire lives. I have already decided what I am going to do with one of their rooms----a dry sauna---but I gotta get em out first.

 

[sealybobo]

Money is taken from people that produce goods, services, and employment and is given to people who don't.

What happens when we shift the tax burden more onto poor and middle class people?

Did you know Trump made $1 billion dollars since January? You're worrying about him?

household debt, mortgage balances and credit card balances rose by $185 billion, $131 billion and $27 billion, respectively, in the second quarter of 2025.

 

[The Sage of Main Street]

Money is taken from people that produce goods, services, and employment and is given to people who don't.

Money Talks, and That's All We Hear

If we tax away large inheritances, even the rich won't have to pay taxes. How can they mind paying taxes if they're dead? Don't be afraid of ghosts.

Quit this self-refuting reliance on strawmen by pretending that taxes only benefit people who don't work.

 

[The Sage of Main Street]

Didn't you hear...the rich do not pay taxes...in fact they get GOV $$$ sent to them weekly

The Plutes Own the Businesses That the Government Spends Our Money On

 

[The Sage of Main Street]

So then those people that produce goods, services, and employment raise their prices, outsource their business to foreign countries, or go out of business.

Apparently the left struggles with simple concepts like this.

Scrooge extortion through scare stories

 

[The Sage of Main Street]

The way the rich share their wealth is through employment. Employees are actually junior partners in the business. Sadly, too many think they are victims of the company.

Owners Aren't Earners

Employees create the value of the investment. Profit is a tax on what employees produce. Those who bake the cake only get to eat the crumbs.

 

[The Sage of Main Street]

Very quaint idea that simply isn't true anymore. there aren't a lot of large sole owner companies. The investor class largely invests for profits. They don't produce anything. They have no production vision and will gladly move from one company to another if the money is better.

Wall Street Is a Runaway Child

That explains why so many sectors didn't bother to use their overwhelming power to stop destructive competition. For example, the actual owners of steel companies, the stockholders, would just switch to a different business sector. They also knew very little about the businesses they had owned and couldn't make them more competitive.

 

[The Sage of Main Street]

Many small business owners don't pay taxes either. They invest profits into growing their business and pay themselves so little that they pay little or no income taxes.

Workoholic penny-pinching zombies like that become bitter and dangerous freaks

 

[The Sage of Main Street]

WTF? Do you not have kids? I suppose if you don't think attending to their education is important, my pragmatic response is so they can get jobs and buy houses and not sponge off me their entire lives. I have already decided what I am going to do with one of their rooms----a dry sauna---but I gotta get em out first.

Treat Superior Students the Same Way We Treat Superior Athletes, from Childhood On

You think you have to buy them their jobs. In a free country, that would be as dishonest as "Saving up money to get my boy on a college football team." Likewise, we never hear "First in his family to play college football."

 

[The Sage of Main Street]

So you would rather have a consumption tax?

Defund the RichKid Reich

Quit relying on the fake alternatives Thought Control provides for us. It's a multiple choice test where "None of the above" is not allowed.

 

[The Sage of Main Street]

You're talking about the stock market I assume. I agree somewhat. Stock trading doesn't produce anything.

Wall Street Makes a Giant Sucking Sound

It's as if pro athletes didn't get paid very well; all the money in sports would go to the bookies and the smarter gamblers.

 

[The Sage of Main Street]

The problem isn’t the ‘rich.’ It’s the super rich. The ******* billionaires who own and control government, media, science, healthcare, etc.

https://archive.ph/2018.11.09-17272...-one-vote-not-really-one-person-one-vote.html

Here’s how billionaires control the U.S. Government.

Only Billionaires Determine Who Can Win National Government Offices in the U.S.

Both the Left and the Right Ignore These Human Vacuums

It's the heirs. They contributed nothing to the creation of the wealth they mooched.

 

[gipper]

Both the Left and the Right Ignore These Human Vacuums

It's the heirs. They contributed nothing to the creation of the wealth they mooched.

STFU

 

[hadit]

We do tax the rich but allow for tax breaks or write offs for investments and business costs like creating jobs...
I'll tell you what taxing the rich won't do and that is bring down the deficit or the debt.... you can tax them @ 90% and the debt. will remain the same....
Libs think if we tax the rich more their income.... or SS payments or welfare handouts will go up... they won't...
In fact they will have to pay more for everything they buy...

The first thing Congress would do to additional revenue is spend more than any increase. We would be no better off.

 

[Captain Caveman]

Money is taken from people that produce goods, services, and employment and is given to people who don't.

They add the extra tax cost to the product/services they provide and/or cut costs by reducing staff's hours etc..

 

[Nobody911]

The wealthy in America have paid less taxes than other classes. True or false? why?

It’s both — depending on how you measure “taxes” and “wealth,” wealthy Americans can appear to pay either higher or lower effective tax rates than other groups.

Why (concise):

• By conventional measures of taxable income (IRS/Tax Foundation): the U.S. federal income tax is progressive — top earners pay a much larger share of income tax and a higher average federal income tax rate than lower-income groups.
• By broader/economic measures that include unrealized capital gains or imputed business income (used in some recent academic papers): the richest households’ “economic” income rises a lot from unrealized gains taxed only on sale (or stepped up at death), so taxes divided by that larger income can yield lower effective tax rates for the very wealthiest.

Unrealized capital gains are increases in the value of an asset you own that you have not yet sold. Because you haven’t sold the asset, the gain exists only "on paper" and is not taxed under normal U.S. tax rules.

Key points:

• Example: You buy stock for $10,000 and it rises to $15,000. The $5,000 gain is unrealized until you sell; no capital-gains tax is due while you still hold the stock.
• Realized vs unrealized:

- Realized gain: gain recognized for tax purposes when you sell the asset; taxed as short- or long-term capital gain depending on holding period.
- Unrealized gain: no tax event; the gain can disappear if the asset’s price falls.
- Tax treatment consequences:
- Deferral: Wealthy investors can defer tax indefinitely by holding appreciated assets, lowering current tax bills.
- Stepped-up basis at death: In the U.S., heirs generally inherit assets with a "stepped-up" cost basis equal to market value at the owner’s death, which can eliminate the unrealized gain for tax purposes.
- Exceptions: Some accounts (e.g., taxable brokerage accounts vs tax-advantaged retirement accounts) and certain rules (like mark-to-market for some traders or the 0.9% NIIT surtax thresholds) affect treatment.
- Policy relevance: Because large portions of very large households’ income come from asset appreciation that is unrealized, including or excluding unrealized gains changes measured effective tax rates and arguments about tax progressivity.

Imputed business income is the portion of economic gain that accrues to owners of businesses but isn’t recorded as taxable wage or dividend income — instead it shows up as retained earnings, unrealized increases in firm value, or implicit returns to ownership. It’s effectively the owner's “pay” for running or owning a business that the tax code doesn’t always treat as ordinary income.

Key points:
- Examples:
- A closely held firm retains profits instead of paying them as salaries or dividends; the owner’s wealth rises but no personal tax is triggered.
- Growth in the market value of a privately held business (or increased equity value) is an unrealized, imputed return until the owner sells.
- Owner-managers extracting value via perks, related-party transactions, or lower reported wages — economic benefit that’s not taxed as regular income.
- Why it matters for tax measurement:
- Standard tax statistics capture reported wages, dividends, and realized capital gains, but not retained or unrealized firm value. Including imputed business income raises measured economic income for wealthy owners, which can lower their measured effective tax rates if that imputed income isn’t taxed.
- Policy relevance:
- Critics argue tax rules let wealthy business owners convert labor/wage income into business income that’s taxed less or deferred.
- Proposals to tax imputed returns include mark-to-market for wealthy owners, deemed realization rules, or targeted minimum taxes.
- Short numeric intuition: If a business owner’s firm value rises $10M in a year but they report only $200k in salary/dividends, conventional tax rate = tax / $200k (high), while an economic tax rate that counts the $10M gain = tax / $10.2M (much lower).

So, imputed business income is the increase in an owner’s economic wealth from retained profits or rising firm value that isn’t reported as wages/dividends or taxed when unrealized. Including it in measures of income shows that wealthy business owners often face much lower effective tax rates than official statistics imply.

Evidence (key sources):

• IRS / Tax Foundation / CBO analyses: show top percentiles pay higher average federal income tax rates and a large share of total income taxes (e.g., top 1% average rates ≈ 23–26% vs bottom half ≈ ~3–4% in recent years).
• White House Council of Economic Advisers (and related research): when including unrealized capital gains, estimated average federal individual income tax rates for the very wealthiest can be much lower (single-digit to low‑teens percentages in some analyses).
• Recent academic debate (papers by Balkir/Saez/Yagan/Zucman and critiques): shows results are sensitive to definitions and assumptions — some studies find lower effective rates for the top 400 by wealth when using expansive “economic income”; others adjust methods and find the tax system remains progressive.

Takeaway: Using standard taxable-income measures — false (wealthy pay higher rates); using expanded measures that count unrealized gains or imputed owner income — can be true for the ultra-wealthy.

In other words: whether the wealthy pay “less” depends on the measure — using standard taxable income, the rich pay higher federal income tax rates; using broader measures that include unrealized capital gains and other imputed income, the ultra‑wealthy can show lower effective tax rates because large paper gains aren’t taxed until realized (and often aren’t taxed at death).

sources:

1. US Effective Tax Rates Remain Highly Progressive, Despite Some Economists’ Claims
2. DavidSplinter.com