You do realize that currently there is only a 2% tax on food items while there is a 7% tax on most everything else and well the gasoline tax I won't even post cause it's outrageous. It's being done in a way already. *cough*

lol, could be.

Can you tell me some of these loopholes? I have a big 8 accounting firm doing my taxes and I still ended up paying over a million in personal taxes last year. Thanks.

Pardon me, but I don't see the unfairness either; unless you are referring to the fact that some people are still contributing more than others.

http://citizenleauki.joeuser.com/article/301955/The_right_the_left_and_the_middle_on_taxation

If you pay over a million dollars in personal taxes, even with a standard deduction rather than itemized, I don't think you have a thing to worry about. In that tax bracket you are taxed at about 35% of your income if no deductions are taken. So you're claiming to have made over 35 million dollars personally for the year. If so then I don't really know how a million in taxes would hurt you that bad. Feel free to look on IRS's website for tax deduction information or simply look it up on Google if you're curious.

I'd disagree on the loopholes being an argument for increasing the tax rate.

Too often loopholes (and tax avoidance) are the convenient excuse, the easy target. People think it means that rich people are getting out of paying taxes that they ought to, often without fully understanding just what a loophole is. In particular the use of the phrase tax avoidance is used by politicians and those advocating higher taxes in such a way as to imply they view it as tax evasion.

Firstly avoidance vs evasion. Evasion is basically breaking the law - you're meant to pay taxes, but you don't (e.g. you report your income as far below what it was). Avoidance however is using legal means to legitimately reduce your tax bill.

Now on to the loopholes/avoidance issue. Lets say the government wants to encourage individuals to give money to charity. To encourage this, they allow any donations to count as an expense for tax purposes. So if you run a business and you make $100k revenue, and against that you have costs of business of $50k, and you then give $10k to charity, you're taxed on $40k rather than $50k. This would count as tax avoidance though - you're avoiding paying taxes on that $10k. However, close that tax avoidance system and you've just removed a major incentive for people to donate money. The tax system can be used in numerous other ways to provide incentives for people to do things, and inevitably when you do this, you will both allow people to avoid paying taxes, and have unintended consequences where people who you didn't at first think of will also use such incentives to cut their taxes.

Now loopholes also covers not just tax avoidance, but unintended consequences of legislation. That is the government might bring into effect some complicated law that they think will cause people to pay taxes in situation X but allow them to avoid paying them in situation Y, but it actually allows people in situations Y and Z to avoid paying taxes. Now where should the blame lie here, with the people in situation Z taking advantage of a 'loophole' to legitimately reduce paying their taxes, or the people who created that loophole in the first place, the government? Furthermore when looking to fix this problem, do you think people in situations A-X should be punished with a higher level of tax because people in situation Z are managing to pay less than they should, or do you think the loophole itself should be looked at? Also if you do increase the tax rate more, you increase the tax that those people will pay if they carry on as before, and hence increase the incentive for them to use a tax advisor who specialises in finding ways to reduce the tax they pay legitimately [i.e. uses loopholes/tax avoidance], meaning you actually then increase the problem!

This suggests of course that the solution to loopholes is even more legislation to cover them. However past history has shown that governments aren't exactly competant when it comes to taxes, and for every problem they try to fix, two more can spring up in it's place. In many ways just creating a very simple tax system with very few 'incentive' (or avoidance) items in it, and looking at the tax system overall (for example not focusing solely on taxes on income while ignoring capital gains, and hence giving a strong incentive for people to try and make normal income count as a capital gain, or vice versa) would solve many of these problems. This is, incidently, another bonus point for a flat rate system - it's far simpler, so not only will it be less costly for people to deal with, but the government might also get a better idea of how it works and so create fewer loopholes in the first place.

Your math is backwards. 1 million is not 35% of 35 million, it's 1% of 35 million. Paying a million in taxes at 35% rate would make a gross income of under 3 million.

Well, I pay 35% on most of my income to the federal government plus another 4% to the state plus 6% sales tax plus property taxes so we're pretty much at 50% right there.

I certainly do take as many deductions as I can.  But you claimed there are loopholes that keep me from having to pay taxes. So I am asking you to name these loopholes.  Being quite familiar with the tax system (I am effectively our company's acting CFO as well) and working with a big 8 accounting firm on a regular basis, I feel qualified to say that there are no legal loopholes that would allow someone like to to skip out on paying a lot in taxes.

As for your question asking how a million dollars in taxes "hurts me", my answer is, on what basis do you consider yourself qualified to decide what the "correct" amount of hurt is in taxes?  Do I drive on special roads? Do I get special police protection?  

Historically, money is exchanged for goods and services.  But you seem to imply that money should be exchanged based on who is most capable of producing it to those who are the most successful in getting the government to believe that they have an inherent "need" to that production.

In addition, one only has to make a little over $3 million to pay over a million in federal taxes.

Ah, exuse me I didn't realize my slip there. I didn't mean you could completely get out of paying any taxes at all, but there are plenty of loopholes to getout of certain amounts of tax owed, etc. I do appologize that was a slip of the fingers.

Property taxes are determined off of how much property you own and it's market value. If you pay a lot of money in property taxes then you must own a lot of land or a lot of high end properties. If you're talking a total of 1.5 million dollars, I concede my math was off that night sorry, in taxes then you must own some property that has a rather high combined value. If you want to have a big car and fancy house and all the rest whatever it may be, good for you. However most of the people in the country can't afford that.

You're upset because they took a good portion of your income away to pay for things such as roads, military, etc. It's understandable, but the money has to come from somewhere. If they tried to take a million dollars away from me in taxes they'd be pretty hard pressed because I make no where near that much. To you it's an inconvenience, to me it would be a devistation. Do I think that the government spends our tax dollars as wisely as they should, no I'm not saying that, but there are things that they do need to spend money on.

As I said before if they could be able to enforce it a flat tax rate across the board would certainly be more fair, however they don't currently have the means that would be required to enforce it. Honestly, they don't really have the means to enforce it now but enough of us are law abiding that it works at the moment. I wish one day I can say that the governement took a million dollars in taxes from me, because then I wouldn't have to worry about whether or not the bills would get paid next month.

I don't see why not.

Most people in the country have a work permit and work is all that is needed to make money to buy all those things.

No, he isn't.

I have known Draginol/Frogboy for years. He is a supporter of taxes and even a progressive income tax system. What he is upset about, and maybe that is difficult to understand, is that other people, mostly those who contribute nothing or very little to the country's welfare, keep pretending that they ought to have the right to define how much is "enough".

I can only recommend that anyone who knows how much is "enough" work as much as is necessary to make that amount and leave it up to other people to decide for themselves how much is "enough" for them.

Oh, c'mon, now--that's BS. No one in that bracket leaves themselves vulnerable without ferreting out every conceivable tax shelter.

3mil in taxable income would be closer to $10mil groaa. 

Your half right this is the land of Oz, oblivious to what is happening. But it's not lions, tigers, and bears that concern me. It's Obama, Pelosi, and Reid oh my, that is the real nightmare.

That's the problem... who should determine how much is enough. Should it be tax payers, should it be our representatives, should it be everyone of us individually? Current tax laws were put in place by people that were voted in by the general population. It's how the system works. If you want to change them, you elect someone who will. Does the system always work, no, but it's the best we got so far.

You know, both me and my husband were Army. We worked 24/7/265 for shit pay in order to do what we deemed necessary, help defend this country and it's rights, which are still unique in the world. Because we didn't make millions of dollars in income does that mean that we have no stake in the country and how it's run? My husband was injured on duty. He currently has a deterorating hip condition where his hip joint is literally eating itself away and has lost several inches of height because of this even though only one of his hips is affected. So in exchange for his military service he gets a progressive disability for the rest of his life and people acting like he's shit because he gets disability. And what does disability get us? Not enough to pay the bills. Not trying to whine, just trying to explain my story so you might better understand my point of view.

I am currently job hunting because the person I was working with decided two weeks ago to just not talk to us anymore and that's about the extent of it. I was working part time with him via computer which is why we still have internet access. I have military training which doesn't count for crap half the time because you don't actually get a certificate unless you pay the University of Maryland to get it for you. I have a partial degree in Accounting which I had to stop due to the fact that we couldn't afford gas to make it to and from the college in order to get my degree.

I'm sorry if I can't feel like someone who makes two million dollars after taxes a year is being cheated by the government because of the amount of taxes that he had to pay when my family has to work their butt off in order to get less than two thousand a month. I am more than willing to put my skills to use, just show me someone who will hire me and there we go. I haven't gotten that chance to make my millions, when I do I will jump all over it and will be more than happy to give the government what I can in order to help others who make less than I do.

I am an educated person who just doesn't have the slip of paper to make it official. My husband gets some payment for injuries that he got because of military service, but because we make that we don't qualify for help in other ways. Unfortunately it seems like we're stuck between a rock and a hard place. If the government wanted to set a flat tax rate and take a percentage of what we make fine with us, but if you make three million dollars you had better be prepared to pay your share evenly without the thought of tax breaks as well. I'm willing to bet though that he got out of paying more tax than we made last year in total.