Warren Buffet: stop coddling the richest Americans

[Ironside]

1. We are NOT talking about a wealth tax or a consumption tax -- both of which MIGHT generate more revenue from the truly wealthy since you would be directly taxing that wealth or taxing the purchases it makes. INSTEAD, we have the income tax. The more "progressively" this is structured, the more it is difficult to become rich...but this means little to those who already are as they often have relatively little "income" per se and hire excellent shysters to recategorize any that they must report so as to minimize the portion taken as tax. Talking about taxing the "wealthy" using an income tax is silly. By the time you had a tax code that closed every "loophole" in which the money growth of the wealthy was hidden so as to not be classified as income, you would have....a wealth tax. So enact one or get over this platitudes and move on.

Wealth taxes (like inheiritence tax) seems to drav alot of ire though, making them unpopular. Property taxes is another example (my house just went up in value thanks to a market bubble. Thanks for the extra taxes). So taxing income is much, easier.
Closing the loopholes keeps the wealth distribution from going more unequal though.

I approve of VAT.

2. Any income tax that will generate meaningful revenue must put the burden of that taxation on the middle class and upper middle class or it will generate little revenue at all.

Bush's tax cuts reduced state income by about 10%. While certainly not the entire budget, it's not exactly small either.

3. Corporations do not pay taxes. They collect them from consumers for the benefit of those running the government. At BEST, some of those customers are foreigners, thus allowing the government to dip its hands into the back pockets of people who are not even their own citizens, but any notion that the corporations themselves are going to pay the tax by cutting the profits to their shareholders/investors is patently fatuous.

Passing it on to the costumer only works if the competition also agrees to it. Take company profit vs company goes around. Company goes around doesn't pay taxes (since it doesn't make profit) so there no exta cost to pass to the costumers, while company profit has to reduce profits or lose market shares to company goes around.

The costumers lost nothing on this.

4. Progressive Income taxes, in practice, do NOT beget the social "leveling" that might have been their sole value (assuming you accept the premise involved). What you get is not equalized wealth, but government dependency. Since the dependents usually have the right to vote themselves more largess -- by electing representatives who promise to fill their troughs/not take as much away as those other jerks -- you end up with electoral power concentrated among government dependents...whose only self-interest would be to increase their benefits at the expense of those still paying. Does the phrase inmates running the asuylum come to mind for you too?

Rome believed in Panem et Circum....but the Head Count did not get to decide the amounts.

I think you got a point here, but not the way you think. The US got a very progressive system, while having low social mobillity for a western nation. While less progressive systems (Scandinavia, Germany), but with a higher total tax ratio do better in social mobillity.

Since the total tax ratio are making more people "dependant" on the goverment (as in more people will get payed in some way from the goverment), either your anology is flawed or the lunatics are running the asylum better than the shrinks.

What I am taking away from this thread is that Europeans are poor.

So is 99% of the Americans.

Come to think about it. How large (as in % of the population) do you expect the upper class to be?