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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   33976 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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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.

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