What a Wonderful Morning

"Robert M. Gary" wrote in message
...
On Apr 15, 4:41 pm, "Anon" wrote:

Once again I think you might be surprised that it isn't really all that
steeply progressive. As pointed out by others the truly elite do not pay
as
much when calculated as a percentage and the upper middle class is more
heavily represented. But the percentages aren't so wildly skewed. Heres
what
a CPA firm publishes about it.http://www.rothcpa.com/archives/003036.php

Gee, they talk about 6 figures like its a lot of money. Around here
you need at least $150,000 to qualify for a 30yr fixed on a 3 bedroom
house (remember, "rich" is relative). What ends up getting me is AMT.

-Robert


Well six figures is a very wide range. It looks fairly flat right up to
nose-bleed territory and I expect that's probably close to right.

Matt W. Barrow wrote:
"Morgans" wrote in message
...

I dream of the day I pay a full million dollars in tax!! Now THAT will be
a
year to remember! Never going to make it BTW, but it's something to shoot
for!

That's the way I always looked at it.

Yep, and that was my point.

I know I will never get there, teaching school. I do believe that
teachers of all subjects deserve better compensation than they receive,
especially in some states that pay less than other states.


When they merit increases, they should get increases.

How would you define "merit increases". That is an extremely dangerous
path to go in education. For a while there was a movement that had
teachers rated by the improvement of their students which led to
teachers keeping the best lessons for themselves and not sharing (the
top 10% get the merit increases, etc.). Of course there are the
teachers who chose to teach the "difficult" students and those students
rarely make great strides. "Jeez, the retarded kids never go up 2 grade
levels in reading in one year! I'll never make money teaching them!".

Margy

No, I haven't read d' Tocqueville since college and I choose not to
argue Marx today. (I also don't teach anymore. I left for a "government
job" that has longer hours and lower pay, but I have an SR-71 parked
outside of my office.

Bring on flat tax. I'll take my chances.

Amen, brother -- but not because it will lower my tax rate.

I just finished another tax season as a the owner of an S Corporation.
This was my 15th year as the owner of a corporation, during which time I've
owned three businesses.

Although I started as a business major in college, way back in "the day", I
finished with a degree in English -- so I'm not CPA material. Nonetheless,
I started doing business on a paper ledger sheet, graduated to "Managing
Your Money", and have now progressed to using "Quickbooks Pro" to run the
show. I personally figure and process all the various and sundry tax forms
each month, and each quarter, and have thus far evaded both bankruptcy and
the taxman's wrath.

Despite this, at the end of the year I am forced to pay a CPA an absurd
amount of money to do my year-end corporate taxes. The resulting returns
are well over 2 inches thick, and contain dozens of pages of
incomprehensible tables and numbers. It would not be inaccurate or unkind
to say that I don't fully understand them, even AFTER I sign them -- which
is an absurd state of affairs.

A flat tax could eliminate all this bull****. Or, at the very least,
simplify it to the point where a simple, college-educated business owner
could actually do and understand his own year-end business taxes. But then,
of course, we would no longer be baffled by all the bull****, which would
shine a harsh light on how much we're all really paying -- something the
gummint has NO interest in divulging.
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/100...t_05-08-06.pdf

--
Geoff
The Sea Hawk at Wow Way d0t Com
remove spaces and make the obvious substitutions to reply by mail
When immigration is outlawed, only outlaws will immigrate.

http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/100...t_05-08-06.pdf

So we are to conclude that other countries are farther down the road to
perdition than we are?

Cold comfort, there.

--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

Jay Honeck wrote:
Bring on flat tax. I'll take my chances.


Amen, brother -- but not because it will lower my tax rate.
.lots of stuff from Jay snipped.

I believe we started this out many years ago with this kind of
simplicity in mind. The tax structure was fairly straightforward after
the forming of the country (well, after we stole a bunch of land from
the American Indians). Then, some bright persons figured out ways to
avoid the simple schemes set in place. Also, somewhere along the line,
we were all asleep at the wheel when the 10% tax cap was repealed. More
complex rules were set in place to close the newfound loopholes. New
ways to invest and make money sprang up. The "people's" appetite for
more govt. programs went wildly out of control.

This vicious cycle of new ways to invest and make money followed closely
by financial people figuring out new ways to avoid taxation fueled what
we have today. This was aggravated by the notion that government should
be the funding source for lots of things the framing fathers of this
land likely did not imagine. One man's perfectly reasonable program is
another man's pork.

It is tempting to streamline it all and leave it at that. The result
would likely be a tax system that is incredibly easy for the well off
(defined as anyone making more money than me) to cheat the system and
pay little to no tax (if you assume that is not the case already). Thus
starting the whole escalation once again. And this does not address the
sister demon: skyrocketing spending. Any tax reform would benefit
greatly from less pressure to raise so much money in the first place
(can you say: presidential line item veto? I knew you could).

So, perhaps a simple tax structure coupled with some mechanism for
review using plain language and plain folks. No ideas on how the
mechanics might work (I outsourced my govt. decisions to my
congresscritter).

Have fun hashing this out.
Mike

Have fun hashing this out.

It's impossible to be too cynical when it comes to our gummint. I'm afraid
it's beyond repair.

The best one can hope for at this point is to complete ones life before the
next revolution.
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

When I had employees and paid those monthly withholding taxes, I'd do
it on Friday night (when the week was done) and imbibe some adult
beverage.

On Apr 15, 4:22 pm, "Morgans" wrote:

Bring on flat tax. I'll take my chances.
--
Jim in NC

Here in Alberta, Canada, we have a flat provincial tax (while the
federal is still graduated). There are hefty personal deductibles as
well, so that the lower-income earners pay little or no provincial
tax, so I suppose it's still not a true flat tax.

We also have something called "Tax Freedom Day," dreamed up by
the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (I think). It establishes the
theoretical date in any particular year on which you finally get to
start keeping the money you earn; the previous earnings for the year
all going to governments of various levels in one form of taxation or
another. Last I heard it was on or around June 21, which means that
the average Canadian pays out nearly half of his yearly income to
taxes. That's the *average,* not the wealthiest. There are some that
pay much more and a few that pay nearly nothing. The tax freedom date
has backed up a day or two in recent years, I think, but not so's a
man would notice.
National debt requires servicing, and until interest rates
dropped a few years ago a third of the federal budget was going to pay
the interest on that debt. It's the result of shortsighted borrowing
and spending. There are many other areas where vast sums are wasted;
we all know that the government does nothing efficiently. Lots of
overlap, lots of redundancy and lots of folks doing little more than
collecting a fat paycheque. Taxes could drop enormously if a
government had the guts to make the cuts.

Dan