Does it bother you that our taxes go for lead pipe replacement? IMO if a government doesn’t pay for it now, many people will sue for restitution. I can easily imagine a multi-trillion dollar class action suit. I’d rather pay now without the lawyer’s fees. Note that it is only municipal pipes that the governments are paying for, not pipes on private property.
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No. The city of Flint water services should have done it decades ago.
You missed my point, the government is “we the taxpayers” so we pay for it. No free lunches here. Semantics maybe, but language matters.
You cannot apply today’s best practices and standards to those of 80 years ago and sue because things don’t meet today’s codes. Holy cow otherwise there is no end to the disputes. Someone drives a 1924 ford and sues because it doesn’t have safety glass? Is that what your study of law and history says?
Your post could be read in more than one way. I agree with you that we pay all the taxes, including corporate and personal taxes. Some people may have read your message as a complaint about taxes but I didn’t. Thanks for the fuller explanation.
Once the municipality and the public recognize it, the government is obligated to pay for the changes in the public water supply. Besides that, do you want children to suffer brain damage due to the public water supply? Baltimore City has a lead abatement program that makes property owners either cover lead paint completely with less toxic paint or remove it completely. The city is probably one of many with lead abatement programs. How can they force citizens to remove lead and not do it themselves?
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Before I get flagged, no I do not want children to suffer. Seems to me that is a parents responsibility to not live in a dwelling with lead pipes. It is a municipal responsibility to supply the water up to the hook up location in the yard. Safety is a shared responsibility. And yes lead abatement is everywhere due to federal standards and enticements.
I’m with you, @bing.
Who knows what pipes a house has?
Madison WI did it on its own.
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https://duluthmn.gov/public-works-utilities/lead-water-education/lead-service-line-replacement/
Gee, really? You must think I’m some kind of dummy if you need to point that out.
Not to start an argument but the latest figure I saw were that the lower 50% of tax payers contribute 2.3% of the total federal taxes collected. Yeah sure they pay property and sales and gas and all those other taxes and fees, but still the distribution is a little skewed.
I personally don’t think this is good for democracy or the republic as it was envisioned. Back to Tocqueville and his 1835 book.
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I’m MUCH more concerned about the low % paid by a number of super-wealthy individuals, some of which pay less $$ (not to mention %) than I do, thanks to layers of deductions created for them, typically property-investing related.
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I am also concerned about large corporations using tax breaks to reduce their tax burden to near zero. Not having enough IRS auditors to check rich guy taxes is another issue. Hiring more agents doesn’t mean that regular citizens like us are going to be audited. They want the best return on investment, and that is going after big money folks that actually do cheat on their taxes.
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And fight the wars, collect the garbage, teach students… The problem isn’t how little tax they pay but how little money they make. I’d rather a flat tax on all income, no deductions of any kind, so that inheritances and donations to foundations would get taxed, but that’s not going to become law.
The billionaires borrow all the money they spend, keep it borrowed until they die, their income goes to heirs or foundations and is never taxed because the basis steps up on death. I guess their heirs have to pay the debts back, otherwise they’d never get the loans in the first place, but taxes were never paid on the income. Bezos paid nothing some years.
Distortions based on anecdotal examples, not what is good for the country. But I agree everyone regardless of income should pay their 10, 15, or 20% whatever it works out to. It is not good when a large mass can determine that someone else should pay but not them.
Hard for a politico to get elected & esp re-elected if they did that.
Good description of ‘him’.
This would require getting rid of the standard deduction, and deductions for children. A minimum wage job isn’t a taxable income.
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A flat tax disproportionately affects lower income individuals, especially if you eliminate the standard deduction. The standard deduction is more valuable to lower income individuals as it reduces their taxable income by a higher percentage. Several states have a flat income tax.
How would non-profits get funded if the donors receive no benefit for making a donation?
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** The top 1 percent’s income share rose from 20.1 percent in 2019 to 22.2 percent in 2020 and its share of federal income taxes paid rose from 38.8 percent to 42.3 percent.*
The above is from the link below…
Scan down to the table that shows which income group paid what percentage. The top 1% paid the highest tax rate percentage at 26.0%
Debts generally don’t pass to the heirs. The borrower dies, the debt dies with them. In Florida, the spouse’s debt does not even pass to the surviving spouse.
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Yes, but we all benefit from the defense of the nation, a judicial system, roads… I’d subsidize lower income individuals. We already do that with EITC - that’d go up, probably as much as the taxes the bottom 47% (Romney’s notorious ‘takers’) pay, making it a wash but changing the mentality. When everyone pays everyone cares how the money is spent; when they get money back we know that we paid it to them; when they get money back they’re more grateful for it. One of the ills of modern government is gratitude-deficit-disorder.
They got funded before we had an income tax. Out of the goodness of people’s hearts.
The trick is how little income they had, not the rate they paid on reported income.
Unsecured debts. Nobody’s lending a billion dollars without security.
The latest IRS statistics https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/21in41ts.xls show that the top 50% of earners paid 97.66% of income tax and made 89.6% of all income for 2021, the most recent year.
This isn’t Mayberry. Non profits were essentially non-existent prior to that. NFPs have proliferated since contributions became tax-deductible:
Source: here.
