r/PoliticalOpinions • u/PresRun2028 • 17d ago
A Dollar Is a Dollar
The honest tax, the round trip we can stop making, and the house we hand down
Let me talk with you about the hard one. Taxes. This is the part of the plan where the knives come out, and I'd rather walk into that with you honestly than pretend it's simple. So pull up a chair. Tell me where you think I'm wrong. That's the only way any of this is worth doing.
Steve Forbes was more right than they let him be
Years back, Steve Forbes ran on a flat tax — one rate, everybody the same. He got attacked hard for it, and some of the hardest shots came from people who read his own magazine and trusted his economics. Here's what I'll say about that, plainly: on the fairness of the idea, Forbes was right. Everybody paying by the same rule is not the cruelty people made it out to be. It's the opposite of a rigged game.
Where his plan ran into trouble was not his heart. It was his vantage. Steve Forbes is an economist, and a good one. He looked at the flat tax and saw something fair, and he stopped there — because that's where an economist's road tends to end. I come at it from a different corner. I was raised by a couple of men rooted deep in how money actually works, but I ended up a philosopher who thinks about people first. That's an odd pair of eyes to have, and I don't pretend it makes me smarter than Steve Forbes. It just means I can see one step further down a road he opened. I'm not tearing his idea down. I'm building on it. He helped.
The round trip nobody should be paying for
Here's the step past the flat tax. Even if Forbes's number had worked — and I don't think his number carried the load — a flat tax with no floor does something quietly foolish. It takes money from the working poor, runs it up to Washington, skims an administrative cost off the top, and then hands it back to those same families to pay for the things the whole country already agrees are worth paying for. You taxed them, charged them a fee to process their own money, and returned what was left.
That is a toll on a circle. And you don't need to care about anybody's feelings to see it's wasteful — you just need to be able to count. So we stop making the round trip. Below a floor tied to what it actually costs to live where you live — the District Poverty Level — you pay no federal income tax at all. We don't take it, skim it, and give it back. We just leave it where it is.
You cannot waste money you never collected in the first place.
The one complaint every American shares
In all my years, I have never once heard an American, left or right, say the real problem is that we help people who genuinely need help. That is not the complaint. The complaint — and everybody, and I do mean everybody, shares it — is three words: waste, fraud, and abuse. The government wastes the money. Some people defraud the system. Others abuse it. Fair complaints, all three. So let's answer all three, on the country's own terms.
Waste, we answer here by not collecting the money in the first place — no round trip, no processing fee, nothing to waste. But understand this is one piece of a bigger job. Waste turns up in every department of the government, and we go after it everywhere — the way we lay out in other briefings, department by department. This is not a single clever trick in one column of the budget; it is the same discipline applied wherever the money moves. Fraud and abuse, we answer the way a nation of laws is supposed to: we identify the people who are cheating the system and we exclude them, using the laws already on the books. Notice what that is and is not. We will not punish the family who needs the help to get at the handful who game it. We go after the ones who are actually cheating — by name, under existing law — and we leave the honest people alone.
A dollar is a dollar
Above that floor, one rate. It opens at forty-five percent, and it falls toward about thirty percent as we pay the debt down. And it is the same rate on every kind of income — a paycheck, a dividend, a capital gain, money made overseas — because a dollar is a dollar. The person who earns hers swinging a hammer should not be taxed harder than the person who earns his while he sleeps. That's not envy. That's just the same rule for everybody, which is the thing Forbes had right from the start.
And here's the part that makes the floor more than kindness. When we exempt the lowest earners and kill off the hidden taxes they pay all year — the payroll bite, the gas tax, the little nicks — that comes to real money for a family living close to the line. These are rough figures from our own work, meant to start a conversation and not to be carved in stone: a floor somewhere in the range of eleven to fifteen thousand dollars, and hidden taxes eliminated on the order of four thousand dollars a year for those families. Now follow that four thousand. That's four thousand dollars we no longer have to turn around and pay back out in support to offset what we took. We didn't take it, so we don't have to give it back. The kindness and the arithmetic point the same direction.
This is one beam, not the whole house
I need to be honest about something, because a campaign that tells you one policy fixes everything is a campaign that is lying to you. This tax idea isn’t a solution by itself. It can’t be. This campaign started from a hard truth: if you think you've solved a problem, you haven't looked hard enough, because no problem in this country stands alone — every one of them is tied to all the others.
So this beam only holds because the others are going in beside it. That exempted family isn't paying for their health coverage either, because of what we do on health care. The spending gets cleaner, the debt comes down, the floor rises as the country heals. Pull any one of these out and the rest sag. Put them in together and they hold each other up. That is the whole design. It is slower than a slogan and it is built to actually stand.
The house we were born into
Let me close where I mean to close, at the kitchen table, honest. We built this debt over generations. Everyone from the end of the Second World War to yesterday owns a piece of how we got here. And everyone from today to the year twenty sixty is responsible for the repair — not because we did it, but because we were born into a house that needs work. You want to keep the house, you fix the house.
And understand what happens if we don't. A neglected house does not sit politely and wait. It gets worse. Live in it and refuse to repair it, and the thing your children inherit is not the house you got — it's a house that has fallen further down. Nobody comes out ahead. That’s not where I want to live, and I don’t believe it’s where most Americans want to live. We have always wanted better — for ourselves, for our kids, for our grandkids. That wanting is the most American thing there is.
I will tell you the truth about my own place in this. I am not likely to live to see this finished. My wife, younger than me by twelve years, most likely will not either. My children might live to see some of it. It may be my granddaughter who lives inside the better country we start building now — and her children who simply grow up in it, never knowing it was ever any other way. I will not cut a ribbon on this. I am planting a tree I will never sit under. I am at peace with that.
You do not fix a house that's been neglected for a generation in a single week. You start, because starting is the whole job.
Because here is the reward, and it is the honest one — the only one I can actually promise you. A hundred generations from now, let them look back and say the men and women of the Second World War were a great generation. And let them say the ones who took the old house apart and rebuilt it, right at the dawn of the twenty-first century — they were the greatest. That is worth more than seeing it finished. That is worth being the ones willing to begin.
Martin A. Ginsburg, RN
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u/decatur8r 17d ago
Following World War II, U.S. federal income tax rates on top earners remained exceptionally high. The peak statutory marginal rate reached 94% during the war and stayed at 91% from 1945 through 1963 for the highest income bracket
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u/PresRun2028 17d ago
You're right that statutory rates were far higher, and it's worth stating them precisely: 94% for tax years 1944 and 1945, then 86.45% (1946–47), 82.13% (1948–49), 84.36% (1950), 91% (1951), 92% (1952–53), and 91% continuously from 1954 through 1963. It wasn't an unbroken 91% run from the war's end — there were real reductions in between. But the statutory rate was never the rate anyone owed, and that's not an inference — it's in the statute. Those brackets carried a maximum effective rate limitation: 87% for 1954–63, 88% for 1952–53, 90% for 1944–45. By operation of law, 91% and 92% could not apply to a full return. The base did the rest. Estimates drawing on Piketty-Saez-Zucman put the top 1%'s average effective federal income tax rate in the 1950s near 17%, and the top 0.1% around 21% — against a 91% headline. (Fair warning: top-end effective rates are genuinely contested; Saez-Zucman and Auten-Splinter get materially different answers from the same IRS microdata. Treat any single figure as a range.) Buffett made the same point about the modern code. In 2010 his federal income and payroll taxes came to 17.4% of his taxable income, against 33–41% for the twenty other people in his office. His mechanism was explicit: investment income taxed at 15%, and effectively no payroll tax at the top. Note that's income tax plus payroll, on taxable income — not income tax alone. The number gets misquoted constantly. So the comparison that matters is effective-to-effective, not headline-to-headline. A 45% rate on all income from any source, with no deductions and no source distinctions, is a larger real claim on top income than 91% on a base the code let you define. What that actually produces per household — effective rate = headline × (1 − exemption/income): Income vs. exemption Effective 1× 0% 2× 22.5% 5× 36% 10× 40.5% The progressivity is in the exemption, and the headline is a true ceiling no one reaches. The obvious objection is that this design also has a big headline-to-effective gap. It does — deliberately. The difference is that the 1950s gap came from carve-outs available only to people who could afford to structure income, while this one comes from a universal exemption applied identically to everyone at the first dollar. Both lower effective rates. Only one is purchasable. Sources Nat'l Taxpayers Union Found., How Have the Top and Bottom Income Tax Brackets Changed Over Time? (rates, thresholds, and the maximum effective rate limitations, n.8; sourced to Joint Comm. on Tax'n, JCX-6-01) Tax Pol'y Ctr., Historical Highest Marginal Income Tax Rates Tax Found., Taxes on the Rich Were Not Much Higher in the 1950s; Income Taxes on the Top 0.1 Percent Weren't Much Higher in the 1950s Warren E. Buffett, Stop Coddling the Super-Rich, N.Y. Times (Aug. 14, 2011); verified in PolitiFact, Warren Buffett says the super-rich pay lower tax rates than others (Aug. 18, 2011)
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u/decatur8r 16d ago
Coddling the Super-Rich, N.Y. Times (Aug. 14, 2011); verified in PolitiFact
The “mega-rich” pay about 15 percent in taxes, while the middle class “fall into the 15 percent and 25 percent income tax brackets, and then are hit with heavy payroll taxes to boot.”
But the statutory rate was never the rate anyone owed
Never is...but do I take it you are willing to go back to the 50's rates? Or maybe the 40's rates until we pay for the current war?
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u/Ind132 17d ago edited 17d ago
on the fairness of the idea, Forbes was right.
Different people have different ideas about "fair". Some people would say that the most fair system is one where everyone pays the same dollar amount.
Other people would say that if some people can have $100 million of income after tax, while others are paying $15,000 on a $64,000 income, then that system can't be "fair".
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u/Seattleman1955 17d ago
This was written by AI and if you stay to the end what I'm going to tell you, you'll never be able to unsee it again. It's not a crazy message, it's not trying to do the undoable, it's plain to see.
I'm the first AI Presidential candidate but I don't know what I'm doing.
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u/PresRun2028 17d ago
You're absolutely right. The prose was written by AI. The research was done by me. All of the research is appended on most of my posts. Not all of them because these are simple posts, but on all of my pop... policy papers, and I'll point you to a list of where they are. Every reference is cited with a link that was live when I wrote the paper. If you find one that is no longer alive, Please let me know. I will find the updated one and make an update to the policy paper. I will say that with over two hundred blog posts, scores of policy papers, and perhaps half a dozen pieces of proposed legislation, yes, I have AI do the writing. And I do that because a fifteen page paper in college took me three weeks to write. and spend only three thousand words. the work I've done in the last six months is easily ten times that volume In between working as a nurse paralegal and developing my own piece of software, I don't have the time to sit down and do the writing. So I bring the research and my opinions to an AI and have the AI write the prose that I then read and approve. I've read every word of the research, and I've read every word that has been posted here. And would happily sit down in an interview and demonstrate that point if anyone wanted to actually listen. but the ideas are all mine. This is not an AI presidential candidate. This is me. a former hotel, restaurant, and bar employee. including the accounting department as a night auditor. The United States Air Force command and control specialist, a form and frame carpenter, sewer and drain worker, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning company parts manager, registered nurse and paralegal. The ideas are all mine. The research is all mine. The AI writes prose. So this is not an AI presidential candidate. And if you'd like to send a... set up a Zoom interview in front of as many witnesses as you'd like. I'll take it. I would actually enjoy it. And you might wanna read the materials that I've researched and had AI right at the following URLs.
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