Help the rich pay more taxes
Posted by Richard on April 10, 2010
This weekend, I'm finally working on my taxes. But after several hours of getting paperwork together and entering data into H & R Block At Home (the new name for TaxCut), I had to take a break. So I've been catching up on neglected reading, like the past week's posts at Mark Perry's excellent Carpe Diem.
There, I learned that a group of millionaire leftists (it's a much underappreciated fact that most of the very wealthy are also very liberal) has been loudly complaining about being undertaxed. Mark Perry suggested that they don't have to wait for their tax rates to be raised to pay more. They can, for instance, make a gift to the U.S. Treasury or simply not itemize deductions, which would likely increase their tax liability significantly.
Of course, they're not interested in doing such things — they're posturing for ideological reasons. And their goal isn't just to increase their own taxes, which they could do easily (and privately), but to increase other people's taxes, too.
But in case there's a millionaire out there who sincerely is looking for ways to pay more taxes (and happens to be reading this blog), I've got another suggestion: you can pay other people's taxes. It would be a double whammy of altruism — you'd be not only doing more to support the commonweal, you'd also be performing acts of charity for those less fortunate than you.
Of course, your charity would have to go to those who actually pay taxes. And according to this other Carpe Diem post, that eliminates almost 50% of households. So these charitable gestures would largely have to be directed toward middle-class taxpayers. Of which there are many.
Since I came up with the idea, I think it's only appropriate that I volunteer to be the first recipient.
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