Yeah. I tried and failed to head it off at the pass. There are some good comments in here though.

I think the logical thing is to have those who most benefit from the infrastructure our taxes pay for

The poor benefit from roads, schools, firefighters, Medical/Medicaid, and utilities as much as anyone. But I think you had the super wealthy in mind. “Those who benefit from infrastructure” is an odd way to pinpoint the super wealthy.

Those who “most benefit” would be those who have been able to leverage the infrastructure and security provided to profit wildly. Not those who are just scraping by.

I think we do agree on all but degree like you said. And maybe mean/median income is too high. I was just trying to come up with a somewhat natural but objective breaking point. I think a more reasonable but also more subjective one might be the “living wage” which will certainly be much lower than mean/median but also much higher than $13k.

P.S. Tangentially related, I found this living wage calculator which put my current LCOL residence at ~$42k and my previous HCOL residence at ~$57k. Turned out to be much closer to Mean/median than I expected.

The standard deduction should be at least the median income…? Wouldn’t that mean that half of people would pay no income tax?

Half or more depending on mean or median. But that’s just a starting point for the discussion.

You might say this is what we should do, but I think it’s unreasonable to say that it’s a total head scratcher why we don’t already.

That’s not what I was intending to ask. Sorry if I phrased it poorly. I’m trying to understand the arguments against it because it’s what makes sense to me.

I just fail to see how this is placing the burden on the poor. It Is structured to do the exact opposite and give them the most breaks.

I think the logical thing is to have those who most benefit from the infrastructure our taxes pay for be the ones who contribute the most. And those that are seeing the least benefit be exempt.

I’d probably agree that the floor on the deduction should come up, and we should raise taxes on extreme wealth to make it up. But at least in its most essential form, income tax is already progressive.

This is almost exactly what I suggested. I think we’re basically on the same page.

The argument is that if you take some money from a lot of people, you get more money than if you take a lot of money from some people.

That’s all dependent on how much you’re taking and from who which I addressed in my comment.

There’s also the argument that if everyone pitches in, the overall burden for each individual is less.

This only makes sense if you define “burden” with a fixed dollar amount. A $6k tax “burden” is going to be a much harder burden on someone who makes $40k than someone who makes $250k

What this fails to address is that the richer you are, the more you can play with your money and end up with nothing to tax.

This could be addressed by the wealth tax I mentioned.

In the end, I do believe it’s politics and the wealthy manipulating people’s perception.

They’ve got us focused on this bullshit culture war when what we need is a good old-fashioned class war.