Let Me Explain Tax Brackets

 The politically polarized internet keeps screaming about one of two things: either it's "inequality" or it's "the economy is being ruined". A lot of the debate seems to center around tax brackets, and what level of taxes lower and middle-class people pay as opposed to the upper classes.

So there's two types of tax structures, and people either support one or the other: "progressive" tax structures, with the rich paying a higher percent than the poor, and "regressive" tax structures, with the rich paying less.

Before we get into tax brackets by the way, I want to clear up a huge mistake people make when talking about this: say you're making $79999 a year, and the next tax bracket starts at $80000. Your taxes will not suddenly jump if you make $80001 a year. You first have to pay the previous tax rate for everything you earned below $80000, and pay a higher rate for the $1 extra dollar (which will of course be almost literally nothing).

Let's go through the reasons for wanting either system:

• Progressive taxes: this is meant to reduce inequality. The problem with inequality is that prices are usually made for the average consumer. If somebody is either a lot richer or a lot poorer than the average, a lot of people won't be able to afford anything. Progressive tax systems are supposed to raise money for the government, so that the government can spend more on social welfare for lower-class people.

          They're also thinking about the power corporations have over politics. Most of the ultra-rich are              selfish; they lobby for laws that are going to help them, and nobody else. Large corporations                  lobby against regulations to prevent farmers from being abused by suppliers. Oil giants lobby                  against renewable energy investment, prioritizing themselves flipping a middle finger to the                  planet. The list just goes on and on.

• Regressive taxes: People who want tax structures to be less progressive think in terms of opportunity. Here's how the reasoning goes:

         Imagine you're a startup owner. You probably don't have enough money you need to get your                 business going, which is why you need investors. The fact is that the ultra-rich do the majority of          investing into startups and small businesses.  While the US doesn't directly tax these investments          (the US doesn't have a wealth tax), it does tax the money people make from selling them (capital             gains tax). 

          People who want more regressive taxes think that taxing rich people will make them want to                  invest less into particularly bold ventures, since they'll pay even more money if it doesn't work              out. This would make it harder for small businesses and startups. Another reason to want                      regressive tax structures is just plain fairness. Imagine you were a middle class person, and you              invested everything you had into real estate: if property taxes are raised to the point that you have           no alternate way of paying them, you might have to sell some of your property every year to keep           paying the tax, until you have nothing left and you're back to where you started.

Most legislative proposals for more progressive taxes basically just raise taxes on the rich, without decreasing them for middle and lower-class people. Why? Because well, the more money the government's got, the more it can waste on absolutely useless stuff. This doesn't solve income inequality, because yet another "social welfare" program doesn't address the root cause of why people can barely pay bills every month.

So now we have a couple problems we need to solve: we need to increase investment into small businesses and startups, we need to make sure a couple of corporations can't play politics like a fiddle, we need to make sure people aren't forced to sell off their work, and we need to make sure lower and middle-class people can make ends meet.

For the first problem, we need to raise taxes on the rich and give a tax cut to the middle class. We have to balance our revenues here: a tax raise somewhere should mean a tax cut somewhere else. The government needs to stop chasing after tax revenue and think about this for once (that's assuming they decide to use their brains).

A tax cut for the middle class would make it easier for middle-class people themselves to afford basic goods. It also makes it easier for them invest as well, since they'll have more disposable income that they can do what they want with. They can start small businesses and startups, compete against bigger companies, and prevent monopolies from forming and screwing us all over economically and politically.

(Don't forget that they'll also be able to buy cool leather jackets.)

Our real-estate investor wouldn't have to face the problem he has if he had more money to begin with. If we actually made sure that he had it, he wouldn't have to sell off his property and work to pay a that tax. Higher taxes on the rich also mean we can cut property taxes for the guy.

Thanks for listening (reading?) to my long-winded rant about the tax system. I'll give you guys a cool song recommendation now, for literally no reason (I don't know how to end this post). Listen to Believer by American Authors.