Tuesday, July 28, 2020
Ideas for Improving America's Economy
On one of the Room for Debate articles I found, titled “Easing the Pain of Automation,” I came across a couple interesting ideas. One being a universal basic income, brought forth by Andy Stern. He says the way it would work is every adult would get a check for $1,000 dollars a month, which is $12,000 a year. This would finally put everyone’s income over the federal poverty line. It could help with starting a new small business or paying tuition and things like that. The other interesting, but talked about topic, is raising the taxes for capital and high wage people, and lowering it for the low wage people. Ronald Reagan had changed this when he was president so that the rich get taxed the same as everyone else, and we have never converted from this. I feel like if we did though, it would solve so many problems. For example we would receive more tax money for things like education and so on, and the poorer side of the population would be better off with lower taxes. People do not want to tax the rich more because most of the rich donate to political causes and don’t want that to stop. However, I feel like this would not stop them or affect them that much because they aren’t really donating a big chunk of their money anyway and have plenty left over. All in all, if the rich people sacrificed just some of their money for taxes, America would be better off economically. Out of these two topics I came across, do you think they are good ideas? Is one a better idea or more plausible than the other? Should we do both?
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I think the first idea is weak. Every adult, regardless of what they make, will get $1000. Also, it will raise the taxes, so this idea is giving back the money that the government took in the first place. As for the second idea, it is already in play. The top 1% in the U.S. in terms of income pay 37.5% of the taxes. Their income is taxed at an average rate of around 30%. The top 10% which consists of people making around $130,000 or more pay about 70% of the taxes. People who make $130,000 or more are taxed at a rate of 21.5% meaning that if you made $130,000, the government requires that you pay $27,950 in income taxes alone. The bottom 50% make less than $41,740 and pay 3.1% of all taxes. I'm pretty sure most of us would like a high paying job, but is it really worth it if we are to pay nearly 30% of paycheck to the government? Now should we tax the rich even more, say, 60% of their income? Will that improve America's economy? I don't think so.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.kiplinger.com/article/taxes/t054-c000-s001-how-you-rank-as-a-taxpayer.html
ReplyDeleteHere is a link with more accurate data numbers.