"John R. Carroll" wrote:

Earnings growth and real wage increases.
Primarily the latter.
snip

As the government at all levels has switched to personal income,
residential real estate, personal property and sales taxes for an
ever increasing fraction of their income as the corporations
avoid/evade taxes and move their facilities to other countries
this is becoming increasingly critical.

It is a well know maxim of hunting that if you want to hunt
ducks, you must go where the ducks are. This means that for
increased revenues the government must go at the corporations and
high net worth individuals as these are the only ones with any
money/disposible income.

One suggestion is to establish a steeply graduated income tax
structure with the brackets set as (sub)multiples of the previous
years median taxable income. Thus low wage individuals would pay
only nominal/minimal taxes [the general principal is that
everybody pays something, even if only a nominal amount], while
the lucky individuals receiving many multiples of the median
income would pay very high taxes.

The benefit here is that as the high wage earners in management
cut wages and benefits for their employees to maximize corporate
profit [and their bonuses] they are also raising their own income
taxes.

Another suggestion is to remove the salary cap for social
security. As currently structured this is a very highly
regressive tax and with much higher effective rates for low- and
moderate- income individuals.

A third suggestion is the introduction of graduated residential
real estate prices, with the brackets based on the median home
value. All home owners should pay something, but people that
insist on owning ostentatious estates with considerable acreage
should pay a higher tax rate. Gated communities should have a
special surcharge.


Unka George (George McDuffee)
...............................
The past is a foreign country;
they do things differently there.
L. P. Hartley (1895-1972), British author.
The Go-Between, Prologue (1953).