Thursday, April 23, 2009

Trickle-Down Taxation

I read a post on a message board recently that got me thinking. One person said "we don't have to worry about our taxes going up; that will only happen to productive, hard-working Americans making $250,000 or more." The other person said "my employer makes that much; there goes my raise."

Previously I had been all for the idea of increasing taxes on better-off individuals and companies while keeping taxes low on the rest of us. But this little exchange got me to think. If the company I work for has to pay more taxes, they will have less money to pay their workers or to invest in capital improvement. So really a tax increases on businesses and well-off individuals can really also end up being a tax increase on the rest of us, without the rest of us realizing it. So we end up paying one way or the other.

Of course there is no guarantee that if our employers get to keep the money, they will use it to increase our compensation or to better our working conditions.

So Sayeth The Shack