So, I hear that taxes are about to rise substantially soon (in 2025) as some Trump tax cuts expire and also Biden's 40% capital gains tax takes effect. I haven't been following the details of these since they come from several news stories over some time now. I just know that it's said that taxes are going up. Combine that with a well-funded IRS, and the government should get more tax income soon. Do you think that we will be able to fund everything that the government is currently doing or will the government add on new costs for new programs by expanding what they do?
With high inflation, the capital gains tax won't just be a tax on real capital gains, but effectively a tax on wealth. Which is what many on the Left are enthusiastic about. Think about it. Even if the actual worth of the property did not really increase, with money inflation there is automatically price inflation of the property. It may not be worth more, but it is worth more dollars because those dollars have become worth less. You still get taxed on that. (The tax doesn't allow you to subtract inflation from the capital gains calculation) It becomes like a tax on buying and selling any valuable property, with you being taxed more the longer you have held the property. And the more inflation there is, the more the real effective tax rates will automatically go up, without government having to pass any new laws.
Most of the tax base has been off-shored now, and the few remaining high productivity jobs in the U.S. are flooded with green card workers. Most new job creation is from govt. spending, i.e. in industries like health care and state and local govt. and their contractors. Financial capitalism guts economies, it doesn't build them or improve them; it loots them and hollows them out via crushing debt. We need to rebuild our industrial base again. That will require tariffs, same as it did in the 19th Century, when our industrial base grew to outstrip Britain and Germany's. Unless you believe we can all get rich selling each other Apple stock back and forth; in that case never mind there is no problem in your mind.
Another thing that's been happening is that with inflating land prices, property taxes have been automatically increasing (since it's based on a fixed percentage). This is putting pressure on many people, and in some cases even forcing some to have to move, or even have to give up having a house. You might ask where these property taxes are going, since you would assume local counties would have more money. Well first of all, with rising land prices and rents, business costs go up, so things get more expensive and the city's money does not go as far. Second, usually about half of property taxes go to pay for county-wide and local schools. And due to high levels of immigration, there are more children in schools, so the public schools require this additional funding. There was one report, for example, that showed over half of the students in the Chicago public school system were children of immigrants. Here is a report that says that between 33 to 35 percent of the parents of children under the age of 11 in the state of New York's public schools are immigrants from a foreign country (as of 2021). It costs somewhere around $18,000 per child per year. In New York City, it costs over $30,000 per student per year (source here). City expenses are also rising because with more people it means more infrastructure has to be built. More roads, or widening roads, which can be very expensive. Certainly the massive number of migrants have put a financial strain on some big cities. In late 2023, there were 20,000 migrant children entering school for the first time in New York City (source here). But I think overall, many cities are more flush with cash now, and it remains to be seen whether these cities will reduce the tax rates. Usually the ones running cities are reluctant to want to decrease the revenue they have to spend.
Americans are undertaxed. There is not enough revenue to pay for what we're doing now, let alone any new initiatives.
the people most undertaxed are the bottom 90% who use the vast majority of government resources but pay very little in federal income taxes. They need to pay more to incentivize them to stop voting for politicians who promise them more and more handouts and expect the top 1% to pay for it
sorry I reject the "from each according to (what the left says) their ability the top one percent pay many dollars for each dollar of benefit the bottom pays pennies at best the issue is not that the rich don't pay enough the issue is that those who want more and more aren't paying for it
