Sums it Up Perfectly

submitted by Orangutan from (i.redd.it)

sorted by:
top
newinsightfulfun
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]C3P0 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (6 children)

Let me give you an extreme example of why removing progressive tax...

I am in favor of a progressive tax and never said otherwise. I already answered your challenge in my previous reply to /u/Canbot. It does exactly what you described and can be modified easily. It is the well-known logistic function:

T = 1/(1+e-x/50000+2)

It took me 2 minutes to come up with a solution better than any income tax solution ever passed by Congress. This is the reason why the pseudo-democracy fails: the majority would never vote for a logistic tax function.

[–]alkhd 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

Someone earning 500 dollars taxes 12% and someone earning 2 million taxes 100%.

Someone earning 500 usd will literally have a higher wage after taxes than the guy earning 2 million, not to mention its very inflexible (you gave a honestly terrible answer to the first part of the question and skipped the second part).

here's a graph of your function showing how utterly terrible it is, x is pre-tax income, y is post-tax income, it's also not a progressive tax rate

[–]C3P0 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

Change the numerator to 0.9 if you'd like. Also, the function can never return 100% for any real number.

Mathematical functions can be shifted, stretched and compressed as needed. I thought it was a pretty good answer. Have a nice day!

[–]alkhd 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

Change the numerator to 0.9 if you'd like. Also, the function can never return 100% for any real number.

It's still beyond retarded.

Also, the function can never return 100% for any real number.

Yeah sure if you don't consider a 99.999998477% tax for someone earning 1 million to be 100%, well I guess they still technically earn a cent so it's not so bad.

I thought it was a pretty good answer.

Seriously? You would have people all over the world laughing at how ridiculous you are if you were in a position to suggest this tax rate. You said that this is better than any income tax solution ever passed by Congress...???

[–]C3P0 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

You're missing the big idea, which is that particular function is not the best function. The point is that there exists some function which is better than discrete tax brackets.

[–]alkhd 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

yes and you are missing the point that you don't need a complex function because you can just use tax brackets and then anyone no matter their mathematical background can easily increase or decrease tax for a given group and anyone no matter their mathematical background can understand what you are doing when you tweak the numbers.

[–]C3P0 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Point taken.