Common Sense Solution: Taxes

By Gabriel Green

Summary: I hate taxes. I bet you do too. Wouldn’t it be nice if they weren’t a burden, and if they actually paid for things we need instead of a bunch of random crap that drives inflation?

Well, spoiler alert, but the solution is actually the same for almost everything with some (simplified) nuances explained more below. You ready?

Solution: Set a way higher threshold on where all taxes start.

Everything else is a shell game by billionaires to keep the rest of us broke and divided.

Who Hates Taxes? WE ALL DO!

In trying to keep this one short(er), I am going to paint in broad strokes and probably over-simplify things. Suffice to say that taxes are complicated, no matter what.

But, since simplifying is what we need to do, some oversimplified explanations might help.

First and foremost, it’s important to understand that taxes are primarily about funding the government. If that doesn’t work, then any secondary goal of a tax policy doesn’t matter.

That’s true whether your goal is something like stimulating the economy through “trickle down” economics, or if your goal is to make the rich folks “pay their fair share.”

Beyond that, I will admit I have my own bias. I kind of just hate taxes.

And, with tax deadlines approaching yet again, I bet a lot of you do too.

You know that scene in Armageddon? The one where Bruce Willis says, “none of them want to pay taxes again. Ever.”

That's me.

Gabriel Gets Super-Libertarian for a Minute

I believe that all taxation is legalized theft.

Now, I’m not crazy about that. I still acknowledge that taxes are necessary. Just theft, too.

The origins of that theft was so that emerging nations could field powerful armies, and I for one like our nation’s VERY powerful multi-branch military.

Later, taxes evolved to pay for various other good things, like walls, roads, ports, internet infrastructure, space exploration, and more. I even support the idea of government having a major role in R&D, mostly by making lots of strings-free grant money available so that nerds can focus on actualizing their brilliance.

Just because I acknowledge that the literal premise of taxation is theft doesn’t mean I don’t think there should be any taxation. At the end of the day, I also way prefer the more peaceful and predictable taxation of modern governments to the random and typically violent methods of ancient and feudal regimes.

I just want taxes to be low-burden, and to focus on paying for the things we actually need.

The Problem with Progressive Income Taxes

To that end, I am wildly dissatisfied with the current tax structure pretty much across the board. I think it’s designed to stick it to the little guy, while making it way too easy for the uber-wealthy to avoid paying for much of anything.

Just ask ol' Chris Ledoux about the Workin' Man's Dollar. (Bonus: Video at end of article.)

Before you come at me with those AFP-style studies proving the rich already pay their fair share, I’d like to clue you into something. Because I worked around those folks for a while.

Those studies are ALWAYS based on the existing income tax brackets. They take folks making $250,000+, or even $600,000+, and lump them all together.

It’s absolutely true that if we only consider the top income brackets, they are paying for the majority of the government.

But, if we separate out the Billionaire Grifter Class, then we realize that what they’ve really done is saddle the folks who are only just starting to get really comfortable with the highest tax burden.

Sure, maybe some petty millionaires can dodge some taxes, but not like the billionaires can.

Scary Math – Designed That Way So You Won’t Ask Questions

As evidence of the shell game we’re all in, please go look at the current tax brackets.

I will use individuals since I’m unmarried, but the same logic applies to households.

The BIGGEST jump in taxes is when it goes from 12% at $12,000ish, to 22% at $50,000ish.

First off, who thinks someone making $12k can afford to give away any of it away?!?

Second, who thinks that getting to $50,000 suddenly makes you able to afford giving away close to a QUARTER of your money?!

While there are other brackets with higher rates, the largest jump is this whopping 10%.

That’s freaking nuts…

The second highest jump is from 24% at $100,000ish to 32% at $200,000ish.

Just think about this crap for a second. If you have $50k you pay 22%, but if you get another $50k on top of that to make it to $100k (200% increase) your taxes only go up 2%...

If you get another $100k from there, your taxes go up another 8%, which isn’t nothing. And that's what I mean by taxing folks who are "just starting to get comfortable." That's who the AFP-style studies focus on, when proving that the so-called-rich are already paying the most.

But even someone with $200k a year can be struggling to pay bills. And if they’re not, I still would rather they spend that money stimulating the economy than giving it to Uncle Sam.

The Billionaire Math Problem: An Introduction

Meanwhile, the Billionaires float on with good ol’, “Buy, Borrow, Die.”

I’ll talk about the mathematical absurdity of billionaires in another piece. It's a whole thing.

The whole scam of the propaganda industry is to create a wedge between people who are mathematically pretty similar, like petty millionaires and folks who are deeply in debt.

At the very least, appreciate the following fact:

If you have $499 MILLION, you’re still closer to $0 than to $1 Billion.

Propagandists make it seem like there are “three classes,” poor, middle-class, and rich.

Our income tax brackets make it seem like there are six classes for further division…

Really, it’s more like two classes. Billionaires, and everyone else.

The tax structure, and the entire propagandic scam of the elites, is to make a bunch of destitute people the enemy of struggling people. It makes the “broke” the enemy of the “barely-getting-by.” Even the “pretty comfortable right now” folks aren’t actually "rich."

It’s not that someone with $600,000 a year in income isn’t doing great compared to someone with less than $60 in their bank account. It’s just that they’re still at a level where bills and expenses matter. Billionaires don’t have that problem.

Billionaires give away casual $1 million checks to voters, and are now blatantly bribing their way into power where they used to at least pretend to use legal methods.

Solution One: Treat All Businesses the Same

So, my solutions are all designed to create both a “fair” tax system, and one that helps businesses to pay their workers and create that sweet, sweet Trickle-Down effect.

Please note that a lot of this is based on some Friedman style observations that the biggest burden of taxes for businesses is calculating cost and ensuring profitability.

First, for businesses.

Reclassify EVERY business type as the same.

I’m not talking about zoning stuff, just taxes. No more different types of businesses like LLC, corporations, etc. No more nonprofits, no more exemptions, no more bull-pucky.

Then, set a flat corporate tax rate on REVENUE, not profit.

If you tax profit, then multi-billion-dollar businesses will stay “in the red” and permanently avoid taxes, while mom-and-pops that just got past “breaking even” get wacked.

Profit based taxing is literally only good at catching honest people. I want to catch crooks.

The key to this working is that you set a REALLY HIGH threshold.

Say, for easy math that most Americans can understand, at $50 million in revenue. Until then, businesses don’t pay ANY tax.

Personally, I’d set the threshold even higher, but I want to keep it simpler for folks.

This protects most churches from being taxed. It protects small businesses. It protects actual nonprofits that help communities. And it doesn’t punish business growth.

It also ensures that mega-corporations that have a logistical incentive to grow beyond huge revenue numbers are able to easily calculate what their burden will be. Instead of hiring a million accountants to minimize their tax burden, they just get to treat it as a cost of doing business, like the price of goods or wages.

For some businesses it won’t make sense to grow so big.

And maybe more businesses will split up instead of just accumulating more “sectors” (like IBM, Microsoft, Alphabet, etc.). Others won’t be able to continue to remain “unprofitable” while CEOs get paid seriously huge salaries (looking at you Uber and Netflix). And finally, others will simply accept the cost because their economies of scale still make sense for their end product, and it’s just another operating cost that is now easy to calculate (like Wal-Mart and McDonalds).

Whatever the tax percentage — which shouldn’t need to be crazy high and could even be as low as 1% depending on other reforms to government spending — it is easily calculable.

And, because fewer firms would be taxed, catching and punishing cheaters just got easier.

Solution Two: Really High Bars for Personal Income Taxation

Second, for individuals.

I will admit, going back to that Armageddon quote, that income tax never sits quite right with me. When you get your first job, and see that first bite of taxes, you understand that you’re getting a raw deal.

Especially when basic responsibilities of the government are going unfulfilled.

But, there is also the reality that some folks have a LOT of income and that we could likely fund government pretty efficiently if we taxed some of it.

So, the key to income taxes is also to set a really high threshold for flat taxation.

And this is for two reasons.

First, seemingly everyone in America wants to be “super-rich” even if a lot of folks pretend not to. At the very least everyone wants to be quite comfortable.

When you tax billionaires, at some level you are taxing peoples’ feelings of wanting to become a billionaire. I’ll address the mathematical problem of that later, but it’s important to preserve the American Dream of turning your family into a wealthy one for all time.

Second, more simply, you don’t want to punish ingenuity, hard work, and even good luck by setting too low of a bar. You need people to feel rewarded for their work, and material distinction is good for that. When it’s not as mathematically out-of-wack as billionaires living in the same place as folks making $40k a year.

Note, the job of politics-done-correctly is to find a threshold that most folks can accept.

Because our entire political class is bought-and-sold by the uber-wealthy folks my structure targets, they currently design tax codes to punish the struggling folks; they do not tax the truly rich. That’s how they pit the small-business-owner against the working-stiff; that’s how they keep us from uniting.

That’s why we’ve all accepted the propagandic myth that “taxing the rich” really means taxing the business owner who’s creating 40 good paying jobs, instead of taxing the billionaire CEO who just eliminated 40,000 jobs to increase his stock prices.

Quick Note on Other Taxes

Now, corporate taxes and income taxes aren’t the only means of funding government that needs to be addressed. There’s actually a lot of mechanisms for getting money into the government that can be worthwhile.

I support sales taxes in general because they catch everyone, even folks with unreported money and tourists. I also support various taxes on things like property, land/space use, and inheritance (they’ll call it a death tax to scare you, don’t let them).

Capital Gains are their own topic but suffice to say that with the right reforms it’d be a lot easier for everyday folks to invest, and a lot harder for billionaires to manipulate the market. And, since capital gains are in fact INCOME, they should be taxed at a certain point but not until it’s a very large sum of money; stop punishing Joe Schmoe for taking out $20k he patiently earned, when Bezos can make $20 Billion in a day and just “borrow” against it.

I even wholeheartedly endorse tariffs when they’re applied to rival countries and luxury goods, or used strategically to ensure American competitiveness in key industries like agriculture and defense. The trick is using tariffs sparingly and wisely, not threatening everyone from friends to enemies with the same exact setup.

The key to all taxes is that we set their starting thresholds SUPER high.

We don’t want taxes to be a barrier to the American Dream.

To anyone worried about billionaires leaving, first I say, “good riddance.” But, then, I will point to methods like tariffs, sales taxes, and corporate taxes that we can levy on them. If they want to leave, AND stop making a profit off American consumers, that’s one thing. If they want to leave and keep selling to us, don’t worry; we’ll get their money somehow.

If you’re inheritance-taxing the guy whose dad died and left him even as much as a million bucks, you’re missing the point of building generational wealth. Focus on the folks who are passing on billions of dollars, or at least a couple hundred mill…

If you’re sales-taxing the groceries a mom needs to feed her kids, you’re missing the point of helping families to flourish. Focus on the folks buying matching Lamborghinis…and tariff those Italian luxury cars, too.

And so on.

Solution Three: Government Spends What They Have, Not What They Project

Back to the purpose of taxes…we need them to be efficient for paying government bills.

Which they currently are NOT!

Take the whole “tax return” thing.

Right now, all of us give an interest free loan to the federal government over the course of the year. Many of us get to the end of the year, and after paying for accounting services or navigating the hell of the (soon to be abolished by literal billionaires) free filing options we then find out that we OVERPAYED the government. Then, with administrative costs galore, we get our extra payments back. With no interest.

Try getting a bank to give you THAT deal on a loan…

Now, if you were to avoid paycheck withholding on an average person and then give them their whole tax bill all at once at the end of the year, it’d cause a heart attack. So, if nothing else was reformed, the tax return scam makes some sense.

But, if we stopped taxing people who are struggling to get by, and started taxing the folks who have a boatload of money, we could actually start getting rid of the administrative boondoggle that is tax returns.

More importantly, we could have the government get paid steadily, based on more straightforward calculations, and then we’d get a lot closer to the real problem that needs solved.

The real problem is that the government spends money it doesn’t have yet.

Most Americans understand this as “debt.”

But, for most of us, if we know we’ll make $300 this week, we can’t spend $500 in credit cards. At least, not without going into the debt spiral many of us have known and hated.

Yet that’s what the government does.

Right now, the government just makes up a massive number for what it thinks it’ll take in.

Technically it’s “calculated,” but since every think tank, government agency, and guy in a basement can do some magic accounting to get whatever number they want, we know these calculations are more about “shopping for a number that sounds right,” than actually doing real math.

But then our government does something absolutely NUTS. They spend more than even their silly math said they’d take in. And…they…just…keep…doing...it.

This is “deficit.” Spending more than even they think they’ll have.

So, the biggest reason for simplifying the tax code might not even be to remove the burden on the people. It’s to get rid of the overly complicated and easy-to-obfuscate way government calculates how much it’s taking in. It removes the main tool the politicians, the propagandists, and their billionaire owners use to keep us confused.

Reigning in government spending demands clearer accounting by the government.

Bonus: Economists Are Propagandists

This gets us into my last point, which I hadn’t planned on adding but realized I need to.

Economists are basically all liars.

Again, painting in broad strokes here people…

Their job is to prop up either the “left” side or the “right” side of the political class to keep us divided on an issue that’s really about Billionaires vs Everyone Else.

Deficit Spending Mythology

First, to tackle the so-called Keynesians and even the Modern Monetary Theorists…

Here’s the problem with permanent deficits. Eventually someone is going to want their money, and they’re going to want to buy some actual thing with it.

And right now, it’s the working folks getting stuck with the bill in the form of INFLATION.

Right now, the powers that be around the globe are fine with this, because inflation actually makes their stocks and their government-backed-currencies worth something. And it’s literally the only reason they can afford to keep piling on debt.

Simple Math – Don’t Be Scared

Think about it like this. If the government has $5, but tomorrow it’ll have $10 by sheer virtue of inflation, it can keep getting away with spending more than it actually has.

That’s why, even when we’re all feeling broke and struggling, GDP can keep growing.

Or, take stock markets, the other big scam of the billionaires.

If a company is only ever going to be worth $1, then their stock can still be worth investing in. You just need to invest at or below $1 and enjoy the dividends.

I know, Finance Bros, it's a little more complicated than that...now go touch some grass.

But, right now, the rich pay $2 for its stock. Not because it’ll ever be worth that much in terms of ACTUAL value. Rather, they know that because of inflation, it’ll eventually be worth $3 without ever improving the value or the productivity of the company.

This is also what makes the “Buy, Borrow, Die” scam work so well.

If they borrow $4, they can technically be “in debt” and not have any income or capital gains, so they don’t pay taxes. Then, when inflation makes the stock worth $5, they borrow some more and pay off the original debt, but have new debt and still no ~income~ so they keep avoiding taxes.

And on and on, until eventually they die, and pass all their holdings on in a lump sum that goes untaxed because the propaganda industry called it a “death tax” to scare us.

The rich need inflation to stay rich. The rest of us need deflation so we can buy groceries.

Free Trade Mythology

Which, of course, brings us to the free-market economists and their problem.

See, these folks seem to think that trade and money exist in a vacuum detached from the rest of us. To them it’s good to outsource 40,000 jobs because “now the goods made overseas will be cheaper.”

But, if none of us have jobs or income, we can’t buy even cheaper goods!

To say nothing of the loss of pride, purpose, and quality that goes with outsourcing…

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if stocks are high or GDP is growing.

It matters if people can afford things.

If we all have a million bucks and eggs cost two million, it’s worse than if we all have $50 and eggs cost a nickel. The dollar amounts don’t actually matter. People’s ability to spend those dollars does.

Economists should focus on everyday people’s BUYING POWER, not inflated stats.

For America to be "Great," everyday people need to be struggling a lot less.

Fixing taxes and government spending, and dismantling the Inflation Industry of the billionaires, is how we get there.

Double Bonus: Some Chris Ledoux