RE: Bill Gates makes a case for consumption taxes rather than income taxes
The idea of the progressive tax is the concept that the wealthy have a social responsibility to the impoverished.
There are many flaws with the system of taxation and many complexities involved with income inequality. How long until we hear "Who knew the tax system could be so complicated?" Come out of some famous person's Twitter feed?
Yes, Taxation is "just paying interest on the Federal Reserve" this is the fundamental core of the National Debt, however that debt came from somewhere. The US bought highways, railways, libraries, parks, banks, automotive manufacturers, military personnel and equipment (the list goes on) with borrowed money. Borrowed from who? US! EVERY ONE OF US, OUR PARENTS, MOST OF OUR GRANDPARENTS! It is our money that the US borrowed and it's our money that's paying it back!
Even though that problem exists, we cannot simply keep inflating the debt to pay for the dollar (imagine $24,500 for a t-shirt) so we still have to generate a way to reclaim some of that capital. This is what our tax system does, it reclaims some of the debt to minimize the impact of inflation which is created by false scarcities.
Income inequality doesn't always come from hard work. I personally have worked 50 hour weeks with my spouse also working full time and, because of occupational inequality and geographic inequality, we were barely able to pay day to day bills. On the other side of the coin, a friend of mine works 12 hours a week and makes $1,000 to $7,000 per hour (she is a grant writer). So why should I have to work 4 times as hard and get so much less? Better still, a former friend was born into money and simply lives off of roughly $150,000 in INTEREST a month. So it's not as cut and dry as work harder to be more successful.
I have often been in favor of a tax on spent money, but not forwarded on to the consumer. In my vision, a system of corporate tax should fund the government and repay the people. This corporate tax could, of course, be offset through philanthropic efforts that relieve the government of financial responsibilities like providing healthcare, building parks, offering housing benefits, and job creation.
I could likely go on for hours ...
I find it interesting that you mention your friend's occupation, but not your own. Also, is inheritance somehow immoral in your opinion?
At the time I was a Bakery Manager for Cinnabon, performing many hours of physical labor, 10-18 a day, and my wife was a cook at Round Table Pizza, making minimum wage to keep up with high volume food orders. And no, I do not find inheritance immoral. When I received my own I paid tax for receiving it and considered it both repayment for the government benefits I have personally needed to use and a pay it forward to people less fortunate.
Edit Also my wealthy former friend is not living on inheritance, his parents are still alive
Okay, you write:
But you seem to neglect that there's a reason there's such an occupational inequality. For if there wasn't, you could easily drop that job and become a grant writer yourself, like your friend. A grant writer requires at least a bachelor's degree, whereas a bakery manager requires at least a high school diploma + maybe some experience. Even then, the average salary for a grant writer is about $44k while the average salary for $49k. This implies that your friend might have gotten some further education than a bachelor's degree, or that she was lucky (i.e. took advantage of an opportunity).
So why do you have to work "harder" to earn less? Because you didn't invest as much time into your education and/or didn't realize or take advantage of an opportunity (which usually means didn't take a risk).
In this case, my friend learned to write grants from her parents who had earned the education. Grant writers do not need any academic certification, they simply need to know where to look for grants and how to write the proposals (it's actually a relatively unskilled job).
A bakery manager doesn't even require a high-school diploma, but it does require years of practical experience (typically 5+) and subjects the worker to high-risk conditions such as heat exhaustion, burns, chemical exposure, fatigue, and a myriad of other health risks.
The difference in the reward is only in "perceived value". In our society we assign work that we perceive as being more valuable (College Education, White-collar, Executive ...) a higher value than we do for work we perceive as having no value (food workers, cleaning staff, cashiers ...). This inequality is so societally ingrained that many people assume the guy in a suit is more valuable than the one in Blue jeans and a torn t-shirt, regardless of their respective skills.
While many people are happy to devalue jobs based on opinion, I seriously doubt that just anyone could handle all of the requirements that must be met to "flip burgers". I've actually had executives in several of the kitchens I've worked and very few of them even knew how to use the industries most common machines.
Even if there was a disparity in skill set, why should my skills be worth any more or less than yours? I still had to learn the skill, practice and hone it to be competitive in the market I worked in.
BTW I am currently a Senior in my Bachelor's of Business Administration with multiple recommendations to Cal-Poly Pomona for a Master's with a focus in Entrepreneurial management and workplace equality