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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   34084 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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Who. Whom.

The trust fund baby who has a fake email job at a non-profit can get the EITC. The blue collar worker might not because they didn't do the forms right. Democrats, of course, want to maximize interaction with the system. Everyone gets a handout! But you need to work through the system to get it.

Simply not being taxed works better for real people.

Uh, blue collar workers have absolutely no difficulty accessing EITC if they're here legally. They may not understand the why but they do understand the how to get the money.

You think blue collar workers don't know how to get the EITC, but your outgroup does? Are there no tax preparation services where you live?

I am a high income white collar worker. I hire an accountant.

But yes, I believe that blue collar workers are often bad at doing taxes and miss out on significant advantages.

nationally about 80% of people eligible for the EITC receive it.

https://www.eitc.irs.gov/eitc-central/participation-rate-by-state/eitc-participation-rate-by-states

I rest my case. Those are really bad numbers.

80% success rate is pretty good. It's pretty obviously not limited to trust fund babies.

The point was that EITC is not limited to hardworking proles but is available to everyone, including people with fake email jobs. The people with fake email jobs will be exceptionally good at claiming the credit. This is what they are built for. That is what they do.

The dude fixing your sink... not so much.

In any case, we're deep in the weeds now. I don't think Trump's proposal is a good one. I never claimed it was.

But blue collar people are getting the shaft and have been for a long time. We need fewer forms. We need fewer rewards for people who fill out forms. We need ways to reward people that don't involve a bureaucrat processing a form, then taking from Peter to pay Paul.

The dude fixing your sink... not so much.

Plumbers are not the brightest trade, but they're functional enough to know how to claim the EITC(pay someone to do your taxes for you). The same is true for basically all working class jobs; your coworkers in February will tell you tips and tricks for getting the most back, and it usually boils down to 'who do you pay to do it'.

Lower working class people get taken advantage of all the time, but this is mostly tax preparers catering, specifically, to lower income individuals and not to the working class more broadly- and most of the taking advantage of is by charging larger fees to get the money sooner, which is ultimately the fault of the people getting taken advantage of.

But blue collar people are getting the shaft and have been for a long time. We need fewer forms. We need fewer rewards for people who fill out forms. We need ways to reward people that don't involve a bureaucrat processing a form, then taking from Peter to pay Paul.

The way to do that is to eliminate fiddly deductions and replace them with lower tax brackets. But people will scream that this helps the rich too (because it does), unless you put special surtaxes and bracket inversions in -- these have been done but they're also unpopular. Especially the inversions, because everyone making good money knows if your brackets go 10%, 20% 30%, 35%, 30%, that upper 30% bracket is going to get eliminated next time Congress is in session.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think this includes people who just didn't file at all

The participation rate shown in the table is the percentage of eligible taxpayers who receive an EITC payment (Number receiving an EITC payment/Number eligible for EITC). The rate is calculated from linking individuals in the American Community Survey (ACS) collected by the Census Bureau to their tax records provided by the IRS on EITC payments and participation. Specifically, the number eligible for EITC is determined by a model using income and demographic information from the ACS, and the number receiving an EITC payment is determined from IRS tax records.

Interesting, that's a surprise. I know a lot of eligible people who either just don't file or don't bother to take the credit (because it's tiny for single people and probably audit-bait).
Guess I have a biased sample

I can assure you the EIC is not missed out on.

Apparently, 20% of the time it is.

https://www.eitc.irs.gov/eitc-central/participation-rate-by-state/eitc-participation-rate-by-states

Mea culpa.

tax preparation services

That has got to be one of the most obviously made up sinecures in the whole world. Making the tax system so complicated normal people require experts to file returns is one of these routinely insane things Americans somehow shrug off, along with imperial units and their medical insurance system.

On your W-2 they would just create a new box that says untaxed OT earnings. When you go on turbo tax, it will ask what number is in box 15. You input that. Pretty simple.

EITC has the problem that it can reduce wages. In contrast this proposal only increases the benefit for working OT; not the baseline wage. So might be harder for the employer to capture the benefit of the tax break.

I don’t think either has a big interaction with the system. But there is a point that this is targeted a bit more to help blue workers / less to help poor white collar worker and is harder to accrue the benefit to the corporation.

I wasn’t making a policy point about comparing blue collar to white collar but a political point.

The only policy point I would make is that I frequently find low paid white collar jobs anti productive (eg activist type jobs).

If you want me to defend this "policy suggestion", I'm not going to. I never even tried to. My attempt was to make a larger point about party alignment between working class/blue collar and the leisure class/white collar.

He seems to have a problem with blocking. He blocked me for just trying to understand what he was saying. It's a shame, because I like a lot of his perspectives, but at the rate he's going, he's going to end up just talking to himself here, wondering where everyone else has gone.

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