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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
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Not to discourage continued bleeding of the rich, but I wonder if this is the right way to go about it. Theoretically, we should already have a lot of laws on the books that slam millionaires for their advantageous position. But, their budget also allows for accountants that shift and hide that money, sometimes on a questionable basis of legality.
Could one prong on this assault be to increase the IRS' operating budget, so that they're able to track down and stop more of these tax haven shenanigans?
Well you could simply start by plugging up a few questionable tax loopholes.
Whether or not the reason the IRS can't collect the tax revenue to be able to provide certain services is because of them not having enough money, I don't know.
But if you're issue is with certain laws on taxation, it would makes more sense to deal with those first.
EDIT: To mention something else that's important to all of this, there's something called the Laffer Curve. The simple explanation is that there's a happy medium between the percentage of income tax and the amount of tax revenue gained. Too much or too little income taxation and you end up with less tax revenue. You can see this in a few times during US history where the income tax wasn't as high, but the tax revenue was great. So to further determine where we should go with income tax you could look at the past few years of projected and actual tax revenue, as well as spending to service government debt among other government spending.
I'm not an economist nor an accountant, but this is likely what you'd have to do to figure out the balance between taxation and government spending in order to have money for certain social services. However, no one wants to do that and another big problem is the government doesn't like being told it needs to manage it's spending better.