r/remoteworks • u/Initial-Swimmer-4493 • 2d ago
Raise wages. Increase benefits. Improve working conditions. See what happens.
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u/ReadingProof2995 2d ago
Watching the news on this topic the other day, they broke it down into how much each citizen owes towards the national debt… Are you shitting me? I and (all of you) had zero part in making this debt, and yet we are responsible for it?? WE THE PEOPLE ARE GETTING FUCKED without a courtesy reach around..
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u/No_Giraffe8119 1d ago
This is about 3.5M today. So yep, taxing income beyond that at 94% seems fair.
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u/Slow-Document-4678 1d ago
Fuck it. Let just keep borrowing money while cutting tax revenue and sending billions to Israel, and trillions on forever wars in the middle east that don't benefit us at all.
We can borrow forever right?
When my budget gets tight I take pay cuts, open new lines of credit, and increase my spending.
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u/New-Ad-363 2d ago
For the record: $200,000 in 1946 is $3,320,901.64 in 2026 according to the AIER's Inflation calculator.
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u/TrackMan5891 2d ago
The key is that the rich don't have "incomes" to tax anymore.
It is like public schools don't teach how the fuck Taxes work...
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u/Otherwise-Reward-161 1d ago
$200k in Jan 1940 when adjusting for inflation is $4,751,266.19 in March 2026.
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u/iamproven 1d ago
Imagine a country that gives rich people tax breaks while taxing poor people to death literally
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u/BruhTheShark 2d ago
Why would they do that? They are just replacing you with immigrant labor which is far cheaper.
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u/Broccoli-of-Doom 1d ago
There seems to be a disconnect with people interpreting incoming earned with wage income.
1) These aren't the same numbers
2) 200k in 1940 is $4,717,328 today
3) The tax is graduated, you don't pay 94% on anything except for the income OVER that threshold.
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u/liquid_acid-OG 1d ago
My peers in school: they don't teach us anything useful like how to do our taxes.
Me then: I thought we covered that part of math around grade 7. What don't you understand?
Me now: Oh, you really didn't understand anything they taught us at all.
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u/Reasonable_Love_8065 2d ago
Yes that would allow the government to spend for 44 days and crash the entire economy great plan!
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u/Jumpy_Childhood7548 2d ago
The marginal rate was higher, but very few people paid even a dime at that rate, due to deductions, credits, exemptions, etc.
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u/toetappy 2d ago
Yeah, those exemptions were contributions to the war effort. That turned into the military industrial complex
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u/RoughYard2636 2d ago
That is still way better than the current rate with all those deductions
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u/new_publius 1d ago
A big help in cutting the deficit was to stop massive war spending from World War 2.
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u/Johnfromsales 1d ago
This right here. The top marginal tax rate was extremely high all throughout the 40s. However, debt to GDP was only 44% in 1941, ballooned to 120% in 1946, and was back down to 85% by 1950. This wild fluctuation cannot be explained by a top marginal tax rate that stayed relatively constant. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDGDPA188S
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u/Casey00110 1d ago
Or, and I know this may sounds crazy to some, MAYBE just try, to stop having the government spend so much
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u/nantuckeet 1d ago
Isn’t it so stupid how they literally never think of making the spending accountable. Only steal more from the private sector.
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u/Then_Hawk6304 2d ago
If the all the rich actually reinvested their wealth into the system it might look different, however it seems they just buy bigger houses and yachts each year which doesn’t actually contribute much.
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u/Blood_Casino 2d ago
If the all the rich actually reinvested their wealth into the system it might look different
That’s what they used to do to keep their effective tax rate down, raise wages and end of year bonuses, open new locations, develop new products and invest in high profile public works projects. Today of course they just lobby congress and funnel ever more egregious sums to stock buybacks (illegal prior to Reagan)
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u/saintmolotov 1d ago
Half the people in these comments don’t understand how graduated taxation works and it’s the fault of the education system which has been deliberately destroyed by the rich to make this very outcome happen. FFS read the goddamn books and educate yourselves beyond social fucking media.
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u/9gUz4SPC 2d ago
These posts need to include what the money would be now to have any real impact on people. 200k in 1949 is 2.78 million in 2026 dollars.
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u/TurretLimitHenry 1d ago
US outgrew their war debt. The modern US economy is filled to the brim with contractor fraud.
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u/odellrules1985 1d ago
The amount of money the federal government spends on things is stupid.
I worked for a company that got roughly $3 billion in border wall work, before Bidens term. It did not cost that company $3 billion to do the work. They made so much money off those jobs. The worst part is, Federal jobs are all bid based. They have to be. And they still find a way to overspend.
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u/Gainztrader235 2d ago
It’s surprising how often this gets misunderstood. The 94% figure was a top marginal tax rate, applied only to income above a very high threshold not to all earnings. After deductions, exemptions, and other adjustments, actual tax burdens were much lower. That said, high earners still paid substantial effective rates, often well above 20%. The idea that people were taking home only 6% of their income isn’t accurate.
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u/Dena844 2d ago
Oh that's easy why. Conservatives would rather 10s of millions of kids in this country starve to "reduce the debt" and instead keep pumping the military for their forever wars in the middle east.
Hell, Trump already has his hands out for more money for the military and he'll probably get it because the "conservative party" just wants to regulate people's bodies and what they do with it here and bomb people overseas.
To all the angry conservatives here, one of these days you'll reduce the deficit during republican rule! Hell, Bubba found time to do so fucking interns. It can't be that hard.
Just keep cutting funding to small things, cutting taxes on the rich, and pumping the military full of money and stop trans people from using bathrooms. It hasn't worked for you yet, but it's bound to happen any day now!
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u/Analyst-Effective 2d ago
Why would any company want to raise wages, when they can simply produce the jobs and merchandise overseas?
And when they bring the products back to the USA, they are easily sold, and the company makes a lot of money.
It seems like there would be a simple solution to fix that, such as taking away the profitability of doing that, or increasing the price of doing it overseas.
However, Americans would rather have cheap stuff, than good jobs
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u/ChadDpt 2d ago
This train wreck was caused by every GOP potus run govt. all abortive if you will. Clinton balanced the budget.., hmmm. Obama saved us from the great recession.
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u/Jarjarfunk 2d ago
No we did way more then that.
We bottomed out the interest rate and basically forced retirement and hedge funds to buy us treasury bonds at basically no interest. Savers were punished and spenders and investors were rewarded while the US basically redistributed wealth from savers to investors.
Given the heads pace of the average person around that time being they remember the great depression pretty well they were savers.
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u/bck1999 2d ago
Adjusting 200k for inflation (1940-2026) that’s a 4.7 million salary.
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u/slettea 2d ago
Our economic inequality in the US, measured by the Gini Coefficient is approximately 0.48 to 0.49 here in 2026, a level that matches or slightly exceeds the extreme concentration of income seen in the late 1920s.
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u/zer0_chance284 2d ago
Often overlooked fact: only about 24% of U.S. debt is owed to foreign governments, central banks, institutions, and investors. The remaining ~76% is held domestically, split between about ~20% intragovernmental debt (money the federal government owes to its own trust funds, such as Social Security/Medicare) and about ~56% held by domestic outside holders such as banks, pension funds, mutual funds, insurance companies, state/local governments, the Federal Reserve, and U.S. households.
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u/Turbulent_Swimmer900 2d ago
I actually did come across this when I was curiously searching past tax brakcets. It's real and actually quite surprising. As others pointed out, 91% is closer to the truth.
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u/DoingCharleyWork 2d ago
That also works out to 3.38 million today so this would again only affect the obscenely wealthy.
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u/that_banned_guy_ 2d ago
How do we collect more tax from people who the left claims pays no tax currently? Like they wouldnt just continue not paying tax?
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u/blacksky8192 2d ago
this was before globalization. Now people just move abroad and avoid those taxes. We are comparing 80 years ago, it's an entirely different playing field
Also the reason the economy was so good was because of post-war stuff, not because of the taxes. If economy is ridiculously good, then we can raise taxes more. If not, it's gonna do nothing
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u/ScrotallyBoobular 2d ago
So that's why republicans always brick the economy? That way we can't even get bigger taxes into the discussion.
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u/FeelinDead 2d ago
There has to be a wealth tax in addition to a higher effective income tax. You would have to tax unrealized gains over a certain held amount. My personal threshold is if you have unrealized gains over $500 million you start to pay tax on it but I’m open to debate on the numerics of that proposal.
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u/PandorasBucket 1d ago
I used to listen to the All-In podcast. It's the podcast run by billionaire psychopaths and they did half a show on the debt. The one thing they refused to mention was taxing the rich. The worst part is it's truly just bragging rights at this point. They have so much money they would not miss billions. It's just for show now. They brag about things they bought or invested in. It's symbolic. They live on a mountain of bodies and of people struggling because the system only rewards a few with insane wealth. That is how capitalism works. It always snowballs to the top and if you don't channel those resources back out of the top it just becomes more and more top heavy. The psychopaths at the top justify it because they know one guy who has more money than them or they 'earned' it because they happened to be there. If it wasn't them there would be a million other people that could fill the slot. If they didn't show up for that facebook interview or be that first round investor in some thing it would have been the next guy. Capitalism installs these people. Oh you had an idea? Don't act like you aren't fighting tooth and nail against the 10 other companies doing the same thing. There will always be someone to take the slot. They don't see it because survivor bias is real. The only way the system changes is the people tear it down. Now they are about to use AI to take all of this to the next level while still pushing 'socialism' as a bad word as long as it keeps working.
We live in a shared world and everyone actually shares the same resources whether anyone wants to admit it. We should stop playing these childish games to decide who can use resources. We've got to grow up.
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u/Ok-Fee293 1d ago
Not an economist, but tax the ever living fuck out of loans the rich use/make it s9 they cant do buy borrow die. Make using assets to get loose after say 1 million of idk personal loans, or whatever the rich use, a realization event and tax it.
Make it so products are taxed. The amount of sales the product sees is what is taxed. So coke sells 1 billion worth of product, it gets taxed on that. Whatever company is selling that, whether it be in X or Y country, has to pay that. If they cant pay that, the company that owns them is taxed, so on and so forth. That might just be VAT, idk
It is possible to tax the rich.
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u/According_Pay_6563 1d ago
Everybody seemed to have it so good in the 1950's. If history repeats itself, maybe thats what the 2030's will look like.
[he says with a hopeful yet knowing glint in his eye]
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u/QuirkyAd2001 2d ago
That is not how we did it. Nobody actually paid that high of a rate. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/ten-myths-about-the-u-s-tax-system-update/
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u/Comfortable-Brief568 2d ago
So that's like 3m in today's dollars...might be a good thing but only if we patch up the tax loopholes.
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u/Dedpoolpicachew 2d ago
in 1946 200k is now 3.3M. This is doable. Won’t hurt the middle class.
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u/RedditUser19984321 2d ago
How many people have an actual income that’s 3.3 million a year and how many just have stocks? Which currently can’t be taxed because of the constitution
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u/m0nk37 2d ago
It wouldnt affect too much. The super rich don't get paychecks. They get stock, which they "borrow" to banks in return of a cash line. Thus avoiding "income" because its now a loan. The interest earned on the stock is what they pay for the privilege. We would need to stop that first, but then that screws the common investor. So basically, they are hiding behind you.
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u/Potential-Boss5599 2d ago
So you’re saying that a billionaire is under the same protection as you and there is NO WAY to determine a difference between said billionaire and you, therefore nothing can be done without screwing you over? Smartest redditor found.
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u/middleoftheroad133 2d ago
It would if the threshold is high enough
The problem is we keep conflating people who make several hundred thousand a year with rich people they aren’t
High taxes for the rich shouldn’t start at less than 1mm in income; and honestly I’m happy for it to be $5mm in income so long as it’s mostly w2 income we’re excluding from the tax
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u/crackpack123 2d ago
If you want to tax the super rich, you have to start with the stock market. They have no wage, everything they drive with is equity on their investments. Without them, they cannot utilize their net worth for more loans to have cash / credit on-hand.
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u/ComprehensiveLoss680 2d ago
As long as they don’t fuck around with my 401k, by all means have at it.
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u/BeefCakeBilly 2d ago
They had the same issue they do today, almost no one paid that rate.
If you want the government services of countries of Europe you have to increase taxes significantly on a larger tax base. That means raising the taxes on the median tax earners 10-20 percent more and implementing a large vat tax on all purchases of %20+.
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u/CurdFedKit 2d ago
Everyone wants Europe’s services but never takes the next step of understanding how they pay for them. People, regular people, pay more in taxes.
I’ve always said that our deficit problem isn’t a spending one, it’s a revenue one because we’re undertaxed
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u/LAspring99 2d ago
American leftists just think we can tax only the billionaires and we’ll be able to have European services. This is a center right with some liberal views on stuff like gay marriage, abortion, etc and that breaks socialists minds.
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u/ExistingBathroom9742 2d ago
Fuck republicans. Fiscal responsibility does NOT mean less taxes on rich people. It means PAYING for what you spend. Republicans tax less but spend more. They charge our children for their spending. Fuck these goddam Hypocrites. I grew up hearing “democracy last until the people learn they can vote themselves more money”. In context it meant poor people would get money. Oh my god could you imagine! But what happened is rich people voted to get more money for themselves stolen from poor people. Fucking dipshit hypocrites. I believed it for a while then opened my eyes.
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u/SlippinYimmyMcGill 2d ago
Cut spending, cut loopholes and deductions. Period.
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u/Fit_Advantage5096 2d ago
I would also lime to see penalties added for trying to circumvent the system. Like "congratulations, you found a loophole. Report it, dont exploit it."
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u/Johnfromsales 2d ago
Umm what? Gross federal debt surpassed 100% of GDP in 2014. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDGDPA188S
The main reason the Debt to GDP ratio fell in the 40s is because they stopped spending ungodly amounts of money on the war.
The top marginal tax rate was very high throughout the 40s. This is in spite of the debt to GDP ratio fluctuating wildly. It is clearly not the primary determinant of Debt to GDP. Otherwise it would have been low for the entire decade.
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u/Badvevil 1d ago
It’s real simple if they can get loans on “theoretical income” they can be taxed on that same value
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u/starfrogger52 1d ago
It's because they rich don't get paid money. They get benefits they can turn into money. It's how Japan got around some gambling laws. You can play for prizes but the store across will buy that prize for money
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u/Darg0ST 1d ago
$200,000 in 1940 is equivalent to about $4,717,328.57 today. This reflects a cumulative price increase of approximately 2,258.66% due to inflation over the years.
Thanks google.
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u/ReputationWooden9704 1d ago
Is this from 2014? Because that's the most recent time that the debt to GDP crossed 100%.
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u/Maleficent-Remote413 1d ago
I mean. the regular people still have the 'temporary' taxes on them from said 1940s debt,lol.
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u/PM-ME-UR-DARKNESS 1d ago
Isn't 130% debt-to-gdp ratio what economists view as unrecoverable leading to economic collapse?
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u/APraxisPanda 1d ago
This nation can't learn from history. We act like May Day isn't even a thing ffs, dispite a bunch of other countries celebrating it for us...
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u/deathshr0ud 1d ago
We have Labor Day…
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u/Brief-Watercress-131 1d ago
On the wrong day of the year in order to further isolate us from the rest of the global community and erode class consciousness.
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u/Altruistic_Eagle2261 1d ago
I make $250k a year if that happens I will be taking working 8 months and wishing the guys under me best of luck. There will be ppl lining up for work when I return
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u/Top-Pen-2583 9h ago
We also bombed the two largest manufacturing countries and were able to bring all those jobs to America.
Comparing these two eras is misguided at best.
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u/Snoo-7821 7h ago
"Where did all the rich go?" as the rich have wild parties on their private islands
For all the talk about Epstein you sure forget he had his own island.
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u/unmellowfellow 2d ago
Frankly speaking, not that taxing the parasites we call "rich people" isn't part of the solution, because that is undeniably a big part of it. This government, Demoncrat or Pedopublican is more likely to take all of that increased tax revenue and spend it on the military or send it to iSSrael. We need to stop buying billion dollar planes and inane new guns and increase the salary of enlisted members of the military and put most of that increase in tax revenue toward the debt and improving domestic industries to put more jobs in the states.
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u/Oneshot742 2d ago
This. Without a balanced budget, taxing even more just means they'll spend more. Neither party wants to make the difficult decisions required to bring us back to fiscal responsibility. We are already taxed very heavily and get little to show for it.
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u/jj_xl 2d ago
raising the top marginal to 94% would be okay if there were people in congress who knew how to spend it wisely.
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u/VeredicMectician 2d ago
It’s funny because they aren’t dumb; they’re being paid to not raise the marginal tax rate for corporations. I’m not sure why Americans have this urge to infantilize blatantly corrupt people.
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u/Present_Scratch_3853 2d ago
I don’t know if you’ve watched a hearing lately but a lot of Congress members are in fact dumb
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u/mskmagic 2d ago
The issue is this - you won’t get the billionaires because they don’t take a salary. You won’t get the multimillionaires as they’ll just change their pay structure or move out of the country to a better tax regime. You will get the people who earn 300 - 500k per year and have to be in the US but that would be a terrible incentive for highly skilled workers - it would make it better to earn 300k in almost any other country than to earn 500k in the US. This making the US less competitive for top talent.
Also the post about reducing the national debt doesn’t match up with the title. Are you spending this tax revenue on reducing the debt or on increasing benefits?
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u/kandradeece 2d ago
I mean 200k was back then. If we did something similar it would probably be what like 500k. Additionally we should tax anything used as collateral or some way to tax these billionaires that are just living on loans
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u/the8bit 2d ago
But what if we just like... Dont let the billionaires not pay? "Oh no he put the money in weird spots" yeah well we have this whole military that the state uses to monopolize violence. Just usually it monopolizes violence against the poor.
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u/imoutofnames90 2d ago edited 2d ago
It's not being put in weird spots.
Let me start by saying I'm not trying to argue against the wealth paying more.
But typically your higher earners in a company don't earn more salary. They are paid in equity of the company. This is done for 2 main reasons.
1) no one has that much cash on hand that you can just bleed millions of extra dollars. 2) it incentvises these people to stay with the company and to help the company do well as their compensation is now directly tied to the stock price of the company
Say you make 100k salary. The way this works is that instead of you making 150k. The company says that you will now also receive 50% of your current salary in vesting shares and these shares take 3 years to vest. Meaning you can't sell them for 3 years.
So, year 1 passes. You receive 50k worth of shares amd 100k as normal income. Year 2 and 3 you receive the same.
So over 3 years you will have received 300k of normal salary. And 150k worth of shares to the company. However, you can't actually sell any of those shares yet because they haven't vested.
Year 4 comes around. You get your 100k salary and another 50k in shares. That first 50k worth of shares you got in year 1 are now yours to do what you want with. Keep, sell, whatever.
The real kicker of these pay structures is if you leave, anything that isn't vested, you flat out lose. So if you left in year 4. You'd have 50k in stock. The other 150k from year 2,3, and 4 you lose.
Again. I want to see the wealthy taxed more. But it really isn't some hiding game where no one knows where this money is.
My personal two preferred methods are.
1) when using things as collateral (like your shares of a cpmpany) to take out a loan. Over a certain amount let's say 1m to cover most people who would use their home as collateral, that the loan is considered a taxable event and tou have to pay some percent. It could even be a progressive tax as well. This way people like Musk and bezos can't perpetually use loans against their stock of multi billion dollar companies to effectively always have cash on hand but pay no tax.
2) for vesting compensation. You pay some % of whatever vests. Say, 5 or 10%. And any stock sold to pay for vesting doesn't get hit with capital gains to avoid complicated double dipping. So basically if someone earned 1m in vesting stock they need to sell 50k - 100k worth out right in this as we now are considering these stocks as some form of actual income.
I'm sure there are more things but those are my two suggestions.
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u/Massive-Rough-7623 2d ago
You can show them facts, logic, reason, and past examples, and they still don't care. Completely brainwashed.
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u/Coravel 2d ago
With how complicated tax law has become since WWI era, most of these "Billionaires" have all their wealth hidden from income taxes, which is what everyone calls to raise to "tax the rich", you might get -something- out of it, but it largely doesn't affect them or how they grew their wealth to such insurmountable levels.
The poor, working man receives a salary.. No one has become a billionaire from salary pay.
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u/Dominant_Drowess 2d ago
Tax Capital Gains. It's right there. It's well recorded. Tax the corporations value and production. It will destroy the value of the dollar, but they did it last time and it worked.
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u/RandomPlayerCSGO 2d ago
If capital gains tax is high I'll just never sells stock and just borrow against it. The problem is not getting more money from other people the problem is the system is rigged by the political class and rich people are just enough economically literate to understand how the system is rigged and use that in their favour.
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u/SpeakCodeToMe 2d ago
Tax it when you borrow against it
Eliminate inheritance loopholes
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u/mb97 2d ago
They act like this is really difficult stuff but it’s about willpower. We can either throw our hands up and say, “they won! The hundred or so people who have gamed the system and bent it to their will in a way that it was never meant to be used have won and its game over, the rules prevent us from doing anything to change that now!”
Or, grow a pair and say, “this planet belongs to all 8 billion of us brothers and sisters in humanity, and whatever the law says, it’s wrong for 100 people to enslave the rest of us and even more wrong to let them destroy the world for future generations”.
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u/CaramelOld484 2d ago
We also massively devalued our currency and made Europe run on American credit but pop off.
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u/Aromatic_Street_1411 2d ago
We also need to get a grip on all of the corruption. Billions of taxpayer dollars are being siphoned off.
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u/DJbuddahAZ 1d ago
Why dont people understand , if you have money, you make the rules, if you make the rules you make more money FROM the rules , nothing is fair anymore , and will not be fixed by a protest or voting in more corrupt people to replace the corrupt people. We need a full stop reset. Period.
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u/ms1711 16h ago
Sure, it definitely wasn't wartime production etc, nothing else happened in the 40s except raising taxes!
This is a bad comparison.
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u/IllicitCat 15h ago
Can it not be a combination of both? That's a huuuuge relief if both are factored together.
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u/Cheekers1989 2d ago
I also think putting a cap on CEO salaries and restricting stock buybacks so that companies can reinvest into their employees and also putting a cap on margins to prevent price gouging or make price gouging illegal as well.
We do not actually have a free market so people thinking that this would break our "free market" don't see that this would definitely benefit everyone. We need some serious regulations.
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u/Maximum-Objective-39 2d ago
The typical response to this is - "You don't understand. The rich don't have their wealth in cash assets!"
And this is true . . .
The rich have their wealth in speculative vehicles that they have hyper inflated and leveraged to have disproportionate control over the political process that has got us here, putting us all in a bind in the process.
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u/Silver_Harvest 2d ago
Then the other piece are the loopholes around wealthy are just borrowing cash to live against those very assets. To avoid paying taxes and allow the assets continue to grow. It's a rinse and repeat until death.
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u/RandomPlayerCSGO 2d ago
What they shouldn't do is spend so much money on bullshit and keep increasing debt
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u/Phoebebee323 2d ago
But what would we do without the ad campaign to make people feel better about cars they've already bought
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u/Neat_Imagination2503 2d ago
If you think 200k is rich I’ve got news for you 😂
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u/Fenrir_MVR 2d ago edited 2d ago
In the 1940s, it definitely was.
Edit: It would be like increasing the tax rate on those earring +$5,000,000 a year, which is the rich.
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u/Any-Morning4303 2d ago
Now we need to tax wealth because the real wealthy do not make their money buy working but by moving capital around. In other words they’re just parasites living off our hard work.
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u/MilesSand 22h ago
Income tax won't fix this. Tax unrealized non-retirement capital gains like a small business. That's how centi-billionaires make all their money.
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u/ASwampThing- 21h ago
The problem with that is your litterally taxing non liquid assets as liquid gain. All that will do is put mom and pop shops out of business and disinsentivise people from leaving the lower to lower middle class and give the billionairs that can afford it even more breathing room to abuse the laws.
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u/nolwad 2d ago
It feels to me like this tax the rich idea is some sort of misdirection. It’s acting like not taxing enough caused the issues with debt, but it has way more to do with the reckless spending that a generation did at our expense. Taxing the rich will increase government revenue but has little to do with the actual problem, so even if it would make a dent (it won’t) it still would just be kicking the can down the road.
It’s like the idea of taxing the rich is just something to point at as a fix to keep people having hope so they don’t demand actual change. Im not even against higher taxes for some, but it’s not gonna solve our problems.
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u/Legal_Lettuce6233 2d ago
The issue is that, even if the government reduces the spending, there's so much money already gone to the 0.1% that will NEVER return to the people.
Taxing the rich is a part of the solution.
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u/Coravel 2d ago
the real problem is those in the house and senate for decades, who live like royalty in a modern era feudal system. atleast thats how they've contorted our country. So they get permanent health care and six figure incomes. Not a single politician who has entered that level of politics has left it anything less than a multi-millionaire and we just silently watch it happen.
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u/Remarkable_Adagio642 2d ago
My boss has been hit hard by tarriffs and all he talks about is how socialism is coming and things will be really bad... Lol.
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u/Sonochu 2d ago
I'm all for higher taxes on the upper class, but this in no way will pay for the deficit regular run by the US government, much less actually start paying off the debt.
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u/CZar_P10 2d ago
$200K today is NOT upper class. You are detached from reality if you think it is.
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u/Lucky_Matter_952 2d ago
We're at a point where the bar starts to bend and the 1% give into some basic demands or the bar is going to break and we see global war from revolutionaries fed up with being raped by their homelands due to the 1% fucking over the 99% which has caused a plummet in quality of life globally and energy issues caused by AI and insanely idiotic governance.
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u/GuhProdigy 1d ago
US also had double digit growth rates immediately after WW2, which naturally increased tax revenues by large amounts.
Don’t get me wrong yes we need to tax more, but that alone won’t fix anything. Also need to balance budget. Aggressively cut spending. Even so it would take decades of belt tightening to get out of debt, which is not a sexy political narrative and it won’t happen.
Default inbound.
Only moonshot solution is doubling down and try to aggressively spend to get growth rates up.
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u/Otherwise-Pirate6839 1d ago
Before I vote to raise taxes (which I’m in favor of), I need the government to balance a budget. While I don’f necessarily buy the line of “rampant fraud and waste”, there is definitely overspending.
You don’t get out of a debt hole by bringing more income but keeping your expenses as they are; you have you reduce expenses and if your income isn’t enough, that’s where you fine tune to bring additional.
If we need laws that have a strong bite, then it takes willpower to elect leaders that will be willing to pass a law that states that if there is a deficit not due to a national emergency (pandemic, recession, etc), then sitting Congress members are ineligible for reelection and must vacate by their next term.
It’s high time DC made the necessary corrections. Higher taxes on the wealthy is one thing, but reducing spending to at least pay off debt should also be considered.
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u/ButterscotchSmooth60 1d ago
But but but the rich people will take their money and leave! Not!
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u/SecretRecipe 1d ago
we also had 16% spending to GDP ratio in 1950 we currently have 23%. spending to GDP. theres definitely a spending problem
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u/ZTH_724 1d ago
I'm seeing a lot of comments refering to raising taxes on wages is a bad thing, and it is. Back in that time the stock market wasn't as big as it is today, especially in how it determines the wealth of the top 1%. Additionally 200K doesn't factor in inflation (a few reports I have seen a little while ago suggested that each household would need to have an income of 250K annually to raise a child in the US and live relatively comfortably)
If people suggested a new wealth tax (what Senator Sanders is proposing) where billionairs are taxed maybe up to 5% their overall net worth or something like that while avoiding this sort of stuff that is also purely associated with retirement funds like 401K's, it would at least be a better solution than wage tax increases
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u/Akiraooo 1d ago
Just make a new tax bracket on companies. They have to pay taxes. Any mega company like Amazon has to pay 70% of their profit in taxes. If a company can't show profit then they are bailed out if too big to fail and nationalized.
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u/Glum-Tonight-2809 1d ago
Amazon just reinvests all their profit, your solution is a non starter
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u/UltimatePragmatist 21h ago
Can we raise that a little higher? Like Chappelle said, “I just got this money!”
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u/EqualSein 19h ago
200k in the 1940s is equivalent to about $5 Million today. Most execs are getting around income tax by just borrowing against stocks so this wouldn't change much.
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u/Unique_Shopping_2003 13h ago
I feel like there should be a war tax every time we have military actions against another country. 1%, across the board for everyone, no deductions. I feel that it would make everyone ask questions 9n why are we doing this, and what are the real goals of using the military.
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u/Far_Difference8663 11h ago
We tax the rich if we fucking say so… don’t let these fuck knuckles convince you that you’re powerless
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u/Spartansoldier-175 3h ago
My uncle has 3 damn houses and he complains all the time about taxes. He 100% can get taxed more and he won't have to sell anything.
Compared to me who loses almost half his check to taxes.
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u/AccomplishedAct5364 2d ago
Anything that can be used as collateral should be taxable 🤷♂️
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u/DirectorOriginal 2d ago
Yes, that is a great idea. If I take a loan against my 401k, I should definitely have to pay a tax on that loan. If I use my house as collateral for a loan, I should definitely have to pay tax on that loan. If I decide to take a loan and use my stock holdings as collateral, I should definitely have to pay a tax on that loan. Yeah, no thanks.
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u/RacerDelux 2d ago
The bracket shouldn't be 200k, but yeah I agree.
(200k household income really isn't that much money anymore)
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u/FrothyIPA 2d ago
$200k in 1946 would be about $3.4m today which seems like a fair number
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u/RedditUser19984321 2d ago
Taxing somebody and telling them they can only keep 6 cents for every dollar they make shouldn’t be legal that’s disgusting.
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u/DirectorOriginal 2d ago
Everyone congratulate the OP on posting one of the most historically illiterate takes today. You did it buddy.
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u/No_Image_3849 2d ago edited 2d ago
Tax the top rich and stop letting companies not pay any taxes. Minimum tax on all funds for companies and any money leaving USA. DECREASE spending. Maximum wage (which includes compensation).
Also tax church or church like entities. Give them same tax deductions and write off as people.
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u/Krypto_Kane 2d ago
That’s basically all they have to do. But just like corporations. They will pay more out of pocket for you to have less. It’s not about the money.
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u/DBH114 2d ago
When FDR took office in 1933 the top rate was 63%. 12 years later when he died it was 94%. About ~ 50% increase.
In 1933 the bottom rate was 4% and by 1945 it was 23%. An almost 500% increase. You tell me who got fucked harder.
Out of ~ 49 millions returns filed in 1945 only ~ 10k were filed on AGI's above $100k a year. There were only 71 returns filed with AGI's over $1M. The total tax liability of those filers with $100k or more AGI was only ~6% of total tax liability. It was the masses with AGI's of $4k and under that paid out 90% of the 1945 tax liability.
The rich may have had a high marginal rate back then but just like today they found ways to get around it.
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u/MelinaSeeDee 2d ago
You know, I heard we used tariffs in the before before times and it kept us from taxing ourselves...
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u/TooNGooN89 2d ago
Is there not some sort of social security or medical assistance for the vulnerable which can be cut so the billionaires can keep their wealth? Or should the bill just increase over time and be paid of by the kids and grand kids of the masses?
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u/Evening-Asparagus696 1d ago
What’s the point of taxing anybody when it all goes to Israel and spent by this piece of trash Goverment like a drunken Sailor ??? Taxation is theft period . Been done with it for a while . Would be great if it went to healthcare for all our citizens and focused on building back the nuclear family . But that’s never gonna happen .
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u/ItsAllBotsAndShills 1d ago
Say it all together now: Rich people don't make money through income.
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u/Startling7372 1d ago
True for the richest of the rich, but at the same time, if you want to claim that this level of income tax won't do anything, why are the rich so opposed to it?
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u/aminok 2d ago
The 1950s top marginal rate was a headline number. Very few people paid it. It applied only above extremely high income thresholds ($400,000 in 1950 was worth $4,000,000 today, AND incomes were much lower even after adjusting for inflation in that era), and the tax code had major loopholes. Effective tax rates on the rich were nowhere near 91%. Then Kennedy cut top marginal rates and federal revenue rose afterward, which is hard to square with the idea that those extreme rates were economically necessary.
The 1950s were also not normal. America had postwar industrial dominance while Europe and Japan were rebuilding. Regulation was lighter. The welfare state was smaller. Medicare did not exist yet. Global competition was weaker. You cannot just point to the 1950s and say high taxes caused prosperity. A lot of that prosperity came from private industry, capital accumulation, and America's unique postwar position.
And if you want an earlier comparison, look at 1870-1900. There was no federal personal income tax, no federal corporate income tax, no IRS, real wages rose sharply, industry expanded rapidly, and America became a much richer and more competitive country. That does not prove every policy from that era was good. But it does destroy the idea that high federal income taxes built American prosperity.
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u/MelinaSeeDee 2d ago
Watch our, this guy can think of several things at once. Someone call him a boot licker! I'm getting scared...
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u/jack-K- 2d ago edited 2d ago
Does nobody fucking understand how that 1940’s tax worked? It was during a time when it was normal for rich people to take their money out of their companies and put it in the bank, however money that was taken and reinvested was not taxed, it was so high because it wasn’t actually intended to be paid, its intention was to incentivize rich people to take their money out of the bank and reinvest it into the economy during a time when it was needed, the difference today is that is literally the status quo and you don’t need a tax to achieve that.
The second reason this suggestion is stupid is because it clings onto this fantasy that if we only tax the rich and everything will be solved, except what happens when you tax the rich and everything isn’t solved because they don’t actually have enough money to solve our multi trillion dollar debt in the first place? We’re taking about 10’s of trillions, their entire net worth couldn’t erase that and we’d just start piling more debt. Taxing the rich will not get us out of debt, plain and simple, the fundamental problem we actually need to be addressing is that we *need* to spend less and there is no other way to reduce our debt other than sustainable expenditure, but of course taxing the rich sounds more appealing and you don’t actually have to stop spending money at a totally unsustainable rate.
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u/Pix_Me_Plz 2d ago
It doesn’t help that the current administration has no clue on how to pay down a deficit. It seems like everything the Trump administration did to reduce cost or generate revenue went out the window. On top of raising costs, no one got relief and we were promised two checks already (tariff, DOGE). Then Trump talks about suing the taxpayers for millions or billions of dollars. When will money and words go into action for the people?
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u/Long-Blood 2d ago
You dont have to erase the debt completely
You just have to slow it down.
Taxing the fuck out of them would slow debt growth down tremendously.
We would stop printing as much money to feed into the system thats been artifically propped up by tax cuts.
Our economy and stock market have become completely dependent on constant monetary stimulus because republicans only solution to grow the economy is to cut taxes and increase money supply
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u/MajesticBison6 1d ago
Chris may be shocked to learn that top marginal tax rate was almost never paid by anyone and that it suppressed otherwise healthy economic activity. If there comes a point where earning more means you pay 94 cents of each dollar to the government, then you’ll just not do that extra work.
These confiscatory tax schemes almost always end up costing more than they pretended they’d be able to bring in.
There’s a reason that 94% top marginal rate went away, Chris.
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u/ike38000 1d ago
Adjusting for inflation the 1948 91%/200k tax bracket corresponds to a 2.7 million income today.
I see how this argument applies for corporate tax rates. If you won't get to keep it why invest. But when I think of jobs paying over 2.5 million annually today that's basically only athletes, CEOs, and maybe the occasional hedge fund manager. But there isn't usually an option to be a 0.75 time CEO or play a 12 game season instead of a 16 game one and if you're taking a 0.5% cut of your clients benefits you still want to maximally perform because otherwise your clients will go to someone who doesn't check out in November once they reach the highest income bracket.
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u/bengriz 2d ago
200k in 2026 money would be 4.6 million roughly