How much taxes is enough, to reach Social Utopia?

How much is enough?

In the past I have stated that effective tax rates are reaching 75% and have quoted other's that have said it is as high 60%.

Just a quick rundown on my situation only recently.

It took me one year to prove to a land development company that I was worth the 60k I requested to be paid in salary. They agreed. I went from 36k to that 60k in one year. I was also paid year end profit share of varying amounts in the neighborhood of 20-25k per year. With the tanking of the economy of course, I am now on the unemployment lines or misemployed with another 20% of Americans. For your info, I am not collecting and have not collected one dime in unemployment compensation. I resigned my position instead of waiting for the inevitable layoff. Anyway, enough about the job.

Now the tax breakdown.

In this breakdown I am including the employer's amount because they would be able to pay the employee more if they were not required to pay the tax. The effective tax rate would be less-but for the breakdown I will use just the rate the employer has to pay.

Income tax rate for the US is at 28% for my earnings bracket for the Fed.
SS tax rate at 6.2% with matching 6.2% by employer, hence 12.4% effective tax rate
Medicare at 1.45% with matching 1.45%, hence a 2.9% effective tax rate
California income tax rate is a cluster****
For single and married filing separately taxpayers:
-- 1 percent on the first $7,168 of taxable income
-- 2 percent on taxable income between $7,169 and $16,994
-- 4 percent on taxable income between $16,995 and $26,821
-- 6 percent on taxable income between $26,822 and $37,233
-- 8 percent on taxable income between $37,234 and $47,055
-- 9.3 percent on taxable income of $47,056 and above.
Okay so for me an approximate rate of 7% for income tax.
California SDI tax rate 1.1%
California UI tax rate on employers is from 1.5-6.2% so say an average of 4%

So far let us add this all up.
28+12.4+2.9+7+1.1+4=55.4% effective tax rate.

Now for the case of getting to this number I did a couple of shortcuts where rates on top of your income from the employer were applied so I will cutoff 5.4%.

We are to the rate of 50% of income is taxed directly on your wages.

Now on the money you get to keep.

To list the other types of taxes here would end in listing 1000's of taxes that we are not even aware of beside the ones we do. Sales tax just being one of the myriad forms.

I will just state that I believe that every dime we spend is directly or indirectly taxed a nickel. 50% of what the remaining money you keep is taken by sales, real estate, licensing, permitting, production taxing, etc etc etc.

Have you ever wondered why a flat tax or fair tax is never implemented?

Now after this breakdown I have shown you that 75% of what I earn is taken by taxes. All of these little taxes I like to describe as the death of a thousand cuts.

Our governments of the world do not like us to see our actual tax rates. They do not like for us to put this together. For those of you that think more social programs are necessary and should be instituted, I ask you-

What tax rate do you feel is FAIR and will reach this social utopia that you think is out there.

none.
taxes just perpetuate the illusion of money or the need for it.
if no one were taxed, if no one utilized money, the need and the illusion of need for it would cease.

reply to post by double_frick


You bring up the elimination of money, what matter of trade do we replace it with?

Originally posted by endisnighe
reply to post by double_frick

 

You bring up the elimination of money, what matter of trade do we replace it with?

in a perfect world we would allow all to either do their part or not. not everyone would choose to sit around idly, in fact, i believe that most would choose to do something useful.
we trade services, expertise and goods that are needed. and for those of higher consciousness no bartering would be required.

i work everyday toward skills that i can then share with strangers for free.

to reach a social utopia we have to get rid of the monetary system altogether. as under capitalism social costs would break the bank so to speak. Thats why u have a very rich america but very little in social engineering. Where in Britain we get taxed in nearly everything but we have a good social engineering though not perfect by any means.
Why would people want to work if they dont get paid? I think people would work to better themselves or their community or they might think if noone is doing it i will do it etc. They are many reasons why someone would want to work if they dont get paid but the people must have a quality of life that is so high that it wants to make them want to work.
However this want happen anytime soon as our current system is too entrenched and we need a world wide castrophe to bring it down so we can start anew

In another thread I have in the NWO section I have such a system outlined where no money would be needed.

Here is a quote from the text from that post

"Why will people work, if they receive everything?" My answer is that not all these homes and lifestyles are not equal; we can establish a scale that establishes value to each service. The higher up your service lands the more you are allowed. This is a very rough outline I have details I will fill in later, there is simply too much to write in one post on how we can change the economy. But know the goal of this is to topple the pyramid where the CEO makes millions more that the hard working factory worker.

it is not perfect but I have been developing it for a while.

endisnighe I have read many of your posts and I do support you on many cases, but I believe you are thinking small and about current situations, please read my thread and tell me what you think about it.

S&F because you gave me more reason to hate taxes.

reply to post by endisnighe

You bring up the elimination of money,
what matter of trade do we replace it with?

No formal system of trade is required.

"Money" and "work" and "trade" are only useful in systems based on scarcity. If scarcity is eliminated these things serve no useful purpose.

Please consider the following hypothetical circumstances: Let us say that tomorrow, some hobbyist invents a star trek style matter replicator, capable of transmuting any material into any shape and material. And, let us suppose that instead of seekign investers, he instead distributes plans for building one on the internet, and thousands of people download those plans.

And then, let us suppose that he and a few others take their matter replicatosr, and use them to build more matter replicators to distribute to whomever happens to want one.

Within a few short months, it would be easily possible to have millions of these things across the world. Anyone who wanted one could simply ask around for someone to make them one. And since the people who have them...have them, there's not much incentive for them to demand payment of any kind. "You want a matter replicator? Sure, give me a few minutes. Here you go."

By this time, people are scanning molecular "blueprints" of things they have already, food, machines, toys, windmills, clothing, etc. and uploading these blueprints to the internet, so that anyone with a net connection can download them and be able to reproduce these things with their own matter replicator at home.

Traditional commerce, money and trade would suddenly become meaningless. The only things of possible value to "exchange" would be time and blueprints. With blueprints freely available on the internet, there would be very little incentive to bother trading those. If you want something, simply download the blueprint and make one. And with anone in the world able to create anything they want at the push of a button, trading "time" would mostly fall away too. Who would want to wait tables when they don't need money to have the things they want? "Service" industries would perhaps still exist, but they would be fantastically altered, and people would only perform services that they enjoyed performing.

The world would be a fantastic place.

Without money and without trade.

reply to post by ahddm

Here is a quote from the text from that post

Would you (or a mod) change the code tag to a quote tag? This post is doing strange things to my display.

Thank you.

Okay, everyone so far has brought me hypothetical examples and utopia ideals without addressing the question of the OP.

Now if you want to go there please give me steps to take to get to this specific Utopia you postulate.

Otherwise it is only an academic discussion, not real world discussion.

Would not making the first step, to these Utopian Ideals, be the realization that the system of taxation needs to be made fair first? Or at least try to eliminate it?

depends on what you expect your tax money to go to simple as that,

but i think the real question is how much of the tax money "we" have goes to needfull things / the utopic dream in reality.

seams today most of the spendings are on insane bonuses to people who do jobs which moraly obligates you to do it for free and on silly buerocracy that resembles that of vogon poetry.

reply to post by endisnighe

everyone so far has brought me hypothetical examples and
utopia ideals without addressing the question of the OP.

Ok. I'll answer your questions.

Have you ever wondered why a flat tax
or fair tax is never implemented?

Only casually.

What tax rate do you feel is FAIR

Any amount that people agree to is fair. Whether that is none whatsoever, or any amoutn up to a full 100% or even assignment of labor by a central organized body in exchange for access to services with no money involved whatsoever.

"Fair" is just a matter of the people involved all finding it agreeable.

and will reach this social utopia that you think is out there.

No amount will acheive this, because it is not quantity of dollars that creates utopia. It is intent by the people involved. Whether there is one or one hundred percent taxation, if the money is used for purposes other than acheiving utopia, utopia will not be realized. However, even if no money and no taxation is involved at all, if the people involved all intent to acheive utopia, utopia is likely.

Would not making the first step, to these Utopian Ideals, be the realization
that the system of taxation needs to be made fair first? Or at least try
to eliminate it?

...generally speaking, I think "realization" would be a positive first step, but what is this "fairness" you speak of? Picking any arbitrary number is not likely to acheive the results you're describing. If you wish to eliminate taxes, that's fine, but there can be systems without taxes that are not particularly pleasant. For example, shackled slaves are not usually taxed.

Allocating money to solve problems is only a partial solution if the system needs a continual infusion of more dollars to keep the problems solved.

if you want to go there please give me steps
to take to get to this specific Utopia you postulate.

I could give you many possible methods. The one I described above leans somewhat towards ideal. So long as we exist in scarcity there will still be incentive and desire for people to control and play power games with one another. However, with existing technology there are many ways in which society could change in the direction of such a utopia.

The keys are basically to make things so easily available that nobody is willing to pay for them, and to phase out industries in such a way that you don't have to deal with "massive layoffs" causing people to beg for work.

Work is the manifestation of a problem, not a solution.

For example, let's say that people in large quantities build private power generation for themselves. For example, imagine a local hobbyists in every neighborhood who enjoyed building windmills in thier spare time. They build a few for themselves, maybe give a couple away, and help others who are interested to also build their own. This becomes a massive trend, and before long self-generation of power is the norm, and the entire industry of centralized power is gradually phased out.

Any industry that you can cause to become irrelevant because what it provides is readily available is a positive move towards utopia. But, it needs to be done in a way that does not involve government mandate or being provided by some central authority.

utopia

All you need to accomplish for utopia is to make the things people want available to them at little to no effort. That can be done in stages, as described with my power generation scenario, or all at once, as per the matter replicator scenario. But the objective is the same: eliminate work, eliminate money, eliminate trade...eliminate scarcity. Build a system whereby everything anyone wants is freely and easily available to them.


[edit on 10-1-2010 by LordBucket]

reply to post by LordBucket


Sorry about that i cant edit it anymore though.