2205
Massachusetts passed a 4% millionaire's tax last year. Now every public school student is going to get free lunch
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
2205 points (98.7% liked)
News
23361 readers
3308 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Good. Now slap a 0 to the end of that 4, and then double it.
Made me curious what the total tax rate would be in Mass. Apparently it has a flat 5% income tax, plus 4% millionaires tax, plus federal rate for income over about 578k is 37%, so altogether it’s 46% for income over a mil in Mass.
Definitely think it should be higher for such wildly high income. Also disappointed to see for being a relatively progressive state Mass has a flat rather than progressive income tax.
Higher, nothing. There should be a rate above which it's taxed at 100%. No one needs to be as rich as Musk or Zuckerberg or Bezos.
And yet you guys wonder why millionaires move to Texas. You increase the taxes above a certain number and they'll take all their wealth, consumption and their taxes to another state.
Taxes should be sustainable. High taxes on rich people aren't sustainable because they'll leave taking whatever taxes they pay and whatever consumption they do which contributes to the economy.
The wealth that they hoard? The consumption they import? Let me guess, they're also "job creators."
Who pays your salary?
A corporation. Not a rich individual.
Who do you think created these corporations? Rich people with aim to make more money.
Capitalism pays your salary. Without capitalism and with theft of wealth via unfair taxation, your job won't exist.
Rich people do not need to exist for corporations to exist. Also, you think wage theft doesn't happen under capitalism?
https://inthesetimes.com/article/wage-theft-union-labor-biden-iupat
All right! Go capitalism!
And no millioneir will keep his money in a state where those are the tax rates. If you make it too high you literally get nothing.
Awww. Too bad for them. What will we do without millionaires hoarding their wealth?!
No, he's saying they will keep it. Just in a way that mass gets literally nothing
So either they will get a lot of money or things won't be any different except millionaires won't be there hoarding wealth?
I'm not seeing a downside yet.
I think they mean the millionaires will find other ways to hoard it to avoid tax levels they won't stomach. Fair? No. Reality? Probably.
People make the same argument about not returning to the tax rates of the 1950s. I say let's try it and find out.
I ... honestly would be up for this approach. When do you run for office, sir?
It would take massive and severe state action to deprive the rich of that wealth, and that money would still not find its way into the hands of the poor because the state, and corrupt bureaucrats within it, would take it for themselves.
The poor themselves would have to band together, organize, steal back all the resources from the rich, and distribute it amongst themselves fairly. And that won't work without a deeply organized plan everyone in the group already agrees to, and even then it might not because the sociopaths and evil people among the poor -- which comprises of a lot of them, sorry-not-sorry but it's true -- will just hoard all of those resources, creating a new ruling class.
Stuff like a ruling class is just the human condition because humanity is inherently evil. The non-evil humans will have to accept that reality is like this, figure out who is trustworthy and who is not, band together the like-minded, isolate themselves and pray a sociopath or evil person never infiltrates their ranks, figure out how to suss them out, and kill them.
Until humanity itself evolves to be more docile, it'll never change.
As your income increases, your ability to reduce taxable income also increases. The goal of the state is basically to target the lazy.
In other words, “Don’t provide children with free meals.”
I'm pretty sure at an 80% rate the millionaires would just spend the rate moving, out of state or out of country depending on how far reaching it was.
And nothing of value was lost...
Like, oh no, what would a state do without their money hoarding exploiters that alredy contribute less than the bare minimum???
And worse - if everyone decided to make these laws, where will the poor millionaires escape to then???
Oh, won't someone think of the millionaires!!!11
Except the taxable income you wanted to tax?
You mean the money that we already aren't getting?
I don't want to tax, I want to eat.
Oh look, someone else who doesn't understand how progressive tax brackets work. Their effective tax rate wouldn't be 80%, only income above a certain (very high) number would be taxed at 80%.
That’s exactly how that would go.
People found all sorts of loopholes to not pay that. Nobody paid that much taxes.
they didn't move away.
lots of people paid that much in taxes (you have to look up how marginal rates work they don't just lose 90% of their wealth each year) and we built huge libraries and free public pools and public schools had art classes and gym classes with teachers and supplies. Hospitals had EXTRA nurses and ambulances were well staffed.
Don't fall for the lies of the rich. We were WAY BETTER OFF financially as a society when they were paying their fair share. They need to be taxed again so we can go back to building public services for people again.
So lemmy is just as stupidly socialist communist as reddit.. got it..
you may be surprised to find the social site built on principles of open-ness and cooperation is actually even MORE left leaning than the reddit populace, politically, socially, all of it.
it's been real nice, hope it stays that way.
Do you have any evidence for that claim, or are you just stating it with certainty because it feels right to you?
Nobody paid 90% of their total income because that's not how tax brackets work.
So lemmy is just as stupidly socialist communist as reddit.. got it..
Because I know how taxes work?
Then we’d be rid of them at least