{"id":4469,"date":"2017-11-04T21:33:06","date_gmt":"2017-11-04T12:33:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/?p=4469"},"modified":"2017-11-04T21:35:12","modified_gmt":"2017-11-04T12:35:12","slug":"rush-is-wrong-on-the-bubble-tax","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/rush-is-wrong-on-the-bubble-tax\/","title":{"rendered":"Rush is Wrong on the Bubble Tax"},"content":{"rendered":"

I haven’t seen the tax bill, haven’t even read any facts about it, so I am just responding to Rush Limbaugh’s opening bit<\/a> on his Friday show.\u00a0 He describes the structure of the tax in question as this: the first $45,000 of income gets taxed at a very small relief rate.\u00a0 Then money after that gets taxed at a higher, normal rate.\u00a0 More rates may ensue, I don’t know, and then when you are above a certain threshold, your tax rate is 39.6%.\u00a0 That is the top proper bracket.\u00a0 Then a funny thing happens: your millionth dollar of income<\/span>, however that may be defined, will be taxed at a penalty rate which is 6% higher, so 45.6%.\u00a0 Let’s call these 40 and 46 just for convenience.\u00a0 You keep paying at the penalty rate not forever, but until you have filled in the hole left by your relief rate tax.\u00a0 Rush says that the relief rate on the first $45K provides about $12K in relief from whatever the prevailing rate is, and so, he says, the next $200K past a million are taxed at 46%, and then the rate goes back to the prevailing rate.\u00a0 That’s right, it goes back down. Now you can clear a billion dollars in income (say) and presumably still pay at the prevailing rate — all except for the window between a million and a million-two.<\/p>\n

Rus argues that this is fundamentally flawed, because it is a sop to those progressive statist democrats (of both parties) who insist that tax cuts be “paid for” by tax hikes elsewhere.\u00a0 This backs up the notion that the money belongs to the government, or that your fellow man has a better claim to your money than you do, and that the government is here to help your fellows to your stuff.\u00a0 Fair enough — I rail pretty well against winning a fight for the wrong reasons, thereby ceding the larger point.\u00a0 That’s called a Pyrrhic victory, that is, a tactical victory but a strategic setback.\u00a0 Yet the larger point to me is this: this is a tax which does not go on to soak the rich as a class in order to relieve the poor as a class, but which only resets a relief rate on the basis of an individual’s own balance seems quite fair to me.\u00a0 I do support a mildly progressive tax structure, and if anything is wrong with the plan, it is the fact that 40% is the prevailing rate.\u00a0 That’s the real problem.\u00a0 This so-called “bubble tax” is not what’s wrong with the plan<\/span>, as described by Limbaugh.\u00a0 I understand the point he is making with regard to principles, and I find his stance valid in general.\u00a0 I just do not think that he has set his scope wide enough to capture what’s wrong and what’s right about this.<\/p>\n

I support this bubble tax, if it is as Limbaugh has described it.<\/p>\n

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I haven’t seen the tax bill, haven’t even read any facts about it, so I am just responding to Rush Limbaugh’s opening bit<\/a> on his Friday show.\u00a0 He describes the structure of the tax in question as this: the first $45,000 of income gets taxed at a very small relief rate.\u00a0 Then money after that gets taxed at a higher, normal rate.\u00a0 More rates may ensue, I don’t know, and then when you are above a certain threshold, your tax rate is 39.6%.\u00a0 That is the top proper bracket.\u00a0 Then a funny thing happens: your millionth dollar of income, however that may be defined, will be taxed at a penalty rate which is 6% higher, so 45.6%.\u00a0 Let’s call these 40 and 46 just for convenience.\u00a0 You … Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4469"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4469\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4471,"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4469\/revisions\/4471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}