By the [Wall Street] Journal’s logic, if I give you a dollar and you have to pay 15 cents of that dollar to the IRS, then your tax rate isn’t 15 percent. It’s 15 percent of whatever was left after I paid my taxes, and after my friend George, from whom I won five bucks in a poker game, paid his taxes, and after his Aunt Sally, who gave him twenty-five bucks for shoveling her walk, paid her taxes, and after Aunt Sally’s customers at the local diner, who gave her fifty bucks in tips the week before, paid their taxes, and … tra la la. It’s a wonder, after all that upstream taxation, that there’s any money left at all.

— Timothy Noah on what should be, I think, the last word on the “capital gains are taxed twice” nonsense. Sure, we should find ways to incentivize investments, but the current 15% tax rate is far below historical norms.

9:15 am - 25 Jan 2012 - 2 notes
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Filed under: #politics #taxes #Mitt Romney

Apparently, it’s not worth asking Paul Ryan to justify tax policies that, for over thirty years, have contributed to wealth stratification in the U.S., and why his party opposed ending a tax cut for the 1% best-off Americans that would have raised anywhere from $700 billion to $1 trillion over the next ten years. If you’re going to be a deficit hawk, all I ask is you be a consistent deficit hawk.

9:36 am - 15 Feb 2011
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Filed under: #Paul Ryan #Republicans #taxes #David Weigel