That money thing...

Okay, so there's a new commercial on the radio around here that states (in short) "Make the rich pay their fair share of taxes." I think it's safe to say that no one likes paying taxes. I certainly don't, and I doubt anyone else does, but they're a necessary evil if we want the government to do everything it does. (If we don't, we should probably stop re-electing the people who keep increasing spending.)

In New York the highest income tax bracket pays 7.7% on top of the 35% they pay to the national government. The average tax payer (I'm guessing here but the 20-100 thousand per year range seems about average [30-75 thousand national]) pays 6.85% on top of the 25% they pay to the national government. Now they want to increase taxes on the rich, and I'm all in favor of that. They have plenty of money, they can afford to pay more than I can. That said, they are already paying their fair share. In fact they're paying more than their fair share. By definition a "fair" tax would be completely level across the board. This is almost universally denounced as unfair to poor people.

Most people, even the more liberal members of the wealthy, will agree that the rich ought to pay more in taxes. They should pay more because they can pay more. I have less of a problem with the income tax than I have with the taxation process. My biggest problem is that it's so (expletive) confusing. It shouldn't require a Master's degree in accounting to figure out the tax forms. Granted, I don't understand the tax code well enough to know how to make the tax code easier to understand.

The only proposal that I actually understand is eliminating the income tax and implementing a consumption tax. I understand this well enough to know that it sounds like an excellent idea right until you actually try to do it. The proponents like to mention the good points like taxing the underground economy (Drugs, sex, and general misconduct) and that it's fair to everyone because it's based on how much is spent not how much is earned. They tend to leave out the parts like severe 5-10 year recessions associated with drastic changes in tax codes.