Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
Good. Now slap a 0 to the end of that 4, and then double it.
Made me curious what the total tax rate would be in Mass. Apparently it has a flat 5% income tax, plus 4% millionaires tax, plus federal rate for income over about 578k is 37%, so altogether it’s 46% for income over a mil in Mass.
Definitely think it should be higher for such wildly high income. Also disappointed to see for being a relatively progressive state Mass has a flat rather than progressive income tax.
Definitely think it should be higher for such wildly high income.
Higher, nothing. There should be a rate above which it's taxed at 100%. No one needs to be as rich as Musk or Zuckerberg or Bezos.
And my kid will still refuse to eat it.... We had free lunches here during the pandemic.
How did you do the custom font on your username? It looks awesome!!!!
emojis, doesn't look as good on iOS because half of them are tiny so it just looks like cOkANe
4% of WHAT is taxed?
Per the article, it's an income tax on any income over a million dollars, so it's essentially an additional state income tax bracket. So, if an entity makes exactly 1 million this year then they won't pay any extra, but if they make 2 million, then they pay 4 percent on that additional 1 mill (40k), over whatever else they would owe before the additional tax.
Like all income tax, there are ways to avoid it or reduce your burden, but not every person/company goes to those lengths.
I personally think a wealth tax is fairer for society, but it's pretty hard to implement and of course has a ton of very wealthy opposition.
I was curious about the budgeting implications because enacting a increase to revenue doesn't necessarily mean increased spending would be covered. For any one to lazy to go off site, but also interested:
"$1 billion of the state's record $56.2 billion fiscal budget for 2024 came from the state's new 4% tax on millionaires."
"State lawmakers agreed to put $523 million of revenue from the new tax toward education and put $477 million aside for transportation."
Didn't find the cost there but on one of their sources:
"A portion of that money will go toward the $172 million needed to provide free school meals, the State House News Service reported."
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?
It's not bleeding anyone. My father was an airline flag carrier captain in Europe. He made what he called "an obscene paycheck". When taxes came around, he would say: look at what they are taking from me, I must be making a ton!
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.