To the editor: A letter author commented that the concept of accelerating taxes on the rich is each unfair and a foul answer to inequality (“Letters to the Editor: California already has proven that high taxes on the rich don’t work,” Sept. 17). Listed here are three causes that protection of the very rich is misplaced.
First, wealthy taxpayers aren’t actually taxed on the true worth of their revenue as a result of most wealth income is barely taxed at all. Taxes, broadly, are taken from wages and salaries. The rich earn cash from leveraging loans, capital good points and curiosity on investments. They pay pennies on the greenback in taxes.
Second, the rich don’t put cash into the economic system like wage-earners do. A household incomes $80,000 spends nearly all their revenue within the native economic system; housing, meals, insurance coverage, different items and companies. A rich family can’t spend something near their revenue on themselves or their companies. Most is saved within the financial institution or sheltered, unavailable for public profit.
Lastly, it’s apparent that the rich don’t actually really feel the tax chew that middle-class taxpayers do. When you earn $100 million, your rich-person’s way of life is totally remoted out of your tax legal responsibility. Even should you paid 50% of that in taxes, you’d nonetheless wrestle to spend a fraction of the $50 million you’ve got left. A moderate-income taxpayer sees their taxes as a zero-sum monetary shuffle that actually takes cash out of their pockets that they might in any other case use to profit themselves.
Most of those factors are well-known, however they’re hardly ever acknowledged by anti-tax proponents. We should always suppose as an alternative of the societal values that taxes are designed for: social advantages for the widespread citizen, not the .1% of the super-rich.
Eric Oxenberg, Camarillo
